On most music sites you can download a song by right-clicking its name and choosing Save Target As (using Internet Explorer — users of Firefox or Netscape click Save Link As.)

This normally saves a copy of the selection in your My Music folder, which is inside your My Documents folder. Before clicking Save or OK, you can accept the song's default name or type in any name you might prefer, as long as you leave the name's three-letter extension unchanged (such as WAV or WMA, etc.).

Not all websites allow you to download songs using the steps described above — some are rigged to keep you from right-clicking on anything.

Nonetheless, if left-clicking a song causes it to play in Windows Media Player 10, you can use File>Save As to copy the song onto your hard drive. If you are using Windows Media Player 11, you need to right-click the Title Bar to display the File menu. Then you can use File>Save As to download the song.

Some sites are rigged so that clicking a selection will let you listen to the song, but will not show it playing via a media player. Well, this problem can usually be overcome by retrieving the song from your Temporary Internet Files folder.

Whenever you visit a website, many of the items you click on — such as images or music files — are copied onto your hard drive into a folder named Temporary Internet Files. The reason is that having these items on your hard drive makes them display faster if you decide to re-access a previously visited page.

Well, most music files you access are copied into this folder, whereupon you can retrieve them by opening the folder and dragging them onto your Desktop. Here's how it's done:

First you have to find the folder that contains the target songs. Windows XP usually has multiple folders named Temporary Internet Files. Go to Start>Search>All Files & Folders and type Temporary Internet Files into the All or Part of File Name box. Also, click More Advanced Options and be sure that Search System Folders, Search Hidden Files & Folders, and Search Subfolders have checkmarks. Now click the Search button.

Next, double-click each of the yellow folders that appear in order to display its contents. When you find the folder that has your target songs, simply drag them onto your Desktop (or into any folder you may have created for them). Finally, double-click any song to play it via Windows Media Player (or whichever media player you might be currently using — I recommend Windows Media Player 11).