By James E. Powell

Although browsing the Web can be fun, it can also waste time and connection costs. Metz's Netriever aims to save you both by automatically retrieving files and images of your favorite Web pages, without a browser.

Netriever can, for example, retrieve your company's employee bulletin every Monday morning. It can also fetch the current day's Peanuts or Dilbert comic strip and display it as wallpaper.

Netriever will download files from your intranet, so monthly files from your accounting department can be scheduled for retrieval while you're at lunch.

A Setup Wizard first asks you which page you want to get and if you want to add that page to a slide show. You identify a file or Web page to retrieve by entering its URL or, if it's on an intranet, the local filename. Or select a page from Netriever's long list of predefined sites. You can also drag and drop a link from your browser onto the Netriever window.

Pages will display as slides in a slide show; you can define parameters such as dimension and background color. You are able to program shows to play back at predefined intervals, or you can navigate each slide manually. Double-click on a preview thumbnail to see a full-screen image.

The program can't automatically tell if a page has changed. And it only retrieves a single-screen image, so you can't scroll down to see more. But the images are so realistic you might find yourself clicking on links.