Dave McManus welcomes the return of the online fashion retailer after losing 80m

Probably the biggest failure of the dotcom world, and certainly the one that drew the most attention, boo.com makes a reappearance this week. It has been five months since the online fashion clothes retailer closed its virtual doors after somehow managing to fritter away 80m in its short life.

The original site was heavily criticised for its often-gratuitous use of high-end Web design, excluding many potential users with less than the most up-to-date browsers and high-speed connection. Many saw it as a classic example of style over content. The fact that after countless millions of development pounds there was still no version that would work on Apple Macs also baffled many.

Looking at the redesigned and relaunched site, you'd be hard-pushed to notice any immediate difference. It is still heavy on Flash content - not necessarily a bad thing as recent figures show 95 per cent of Web users are now able to view it. Fashionmall, the company who couldn't resist purchasing boo.com for a serious bargain, is obviously keen to keep its corporate imagery and, who knows, this could well work out in their favour. They say that even bad publicity is still publicity and boo.com could well prove this to be the case. There's a healthy million-dollar budget for marketing and advertising in the run-up to Christmas, so boo.com could yet be the success it so desperately wants to be.

I have spent much more time than I should have done over the past week playing with some excellent music-making software downloaded from various sites. First, I went drum loop crazy with Hammerhead, drum machine software that rivals expensive bits of hardware. Download it from www.threechords.com/ hammerhead and get with the beat. Widely recognised as the best music creation software, Fruity Loops can produce professional quality dance music. To prove this point, some clever 'muso' types have re-created classic tracks that can be played in the software. If you have the audio equipment to match, there's no reason why you couldn't produce 'proper' dance music with Fruity Loops. Budding Fat Boy Slims take note.

With the cut-throat rivalry between Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, you would be forgiven for thinking that the marketplace for new Web browsers was non-existent. However, there are plenty of other browsers out there waiting for your approval and use. The most popular of the also-rans is a rather nice looking browser called Opera.

Opera is available for more platforms than you can imagine and claims to be faster at rendering pages than its big brother counterparts. Curiously for a browser though, Opera is not freeware, so you need to be really in love with it to voluntarily pay for a product rather than use one of its free rivals. Now there is another new browser on the block and, unlike Opera, it's free. Enigma is a tiny application that claims to render pages in record time. The browser is stripped of all the features you have probably come to love from your IE or Netscape, but if it speeds up your surfing time, that's probably something that we can live with.