New surveys show that consumers are changing their holiday shopping habits and, with just one week until Christmas, they are making online purchases at levels that exceed estimates.

Amid such indications of online shopping strength, shares of several Internet commerce giants have jumped. America Online Inc. stock climbed $3.25 to close at $96 after the online service, based in Dulles reported that 750,000 subscribers made their first online purchases during the past two weeks.

Shares of Amazon Inc., the online bookseller, rose a staggering $46.25 two days ago to close at $289 after one Wall Street analyst said the stock would reach $400 in the next 12 months.

While stores and malls say it's too soon to tell whether their sales have been hurt by Internet commerce, online retailers are reporting a virtualstampede of shoppers onto their World Wide Web sites. Recent surveys show that about one-third of Internet users have made purchases online in the past, but retailers say that number is rising rapidly this holiday season -- fuelled by a flurry of media attention to electronic retailing.

The number of people visiting Web retailers rose nearly 80 per cent in the second week of December, according to a survey of 40 top online stores by Media Metrix Inc., an Internet research group.

``It's going phenomenally well,'' said Judy Neuman, who runs the online division of Eddie Bauer Inc. She said the clothing retailer has had record online shopping volume this season. ``We have an avalanche of brand-new customers,'' she said.

Traffic at Barnes & Noble Inc.'s Web site has surged 400 per cent since early summer, the company spokesman said.

The online site has been attracting two kinds of shoppers, the spokesperson said. The first group prints out information on books from the site and then drives to the store forpurchases.

The new group of customers makes purchases online, taking advantage of the medium's convenience. It's unclear how online sales are affecting traditional retailers because many store owners have recently added catalogues and Web sites -- and many do not track which sales were made in the store and which were made electronically.

TeleCheck Services Inc., a check acceptance company, said same-store sales -- revenue at stores open more than a year -- rose a moderate 4.4 per cent on the day after Thanksgiving, compared with the same day in 1997.

Online retailing still accounts for only a small portion of total retail sales, according to the Direct Marketing Association of New York. While online sales are projected to more than double, to $4.7 billion, this year, catalogue sales were estimated to reach $87 billion and overall retail sales to total $2.6 trillion.

Still Internet commerce is gaining momentum, and yesterday Wall Street took notice. Amazon.com was the talk of the investment world asits stock jumped 19 per cent following a prediction by Henry Blodgett, a CIBC Oppenheimer & Co. analyst that the online bookselling behemoth would trade at $400 a share in 12 months -- after rocketing more than eightfold this year.

In his research report, Blodgett said the number of orders logged on Amazon Web site the day after Thanksgiving was four times higher than a year earlier. The company could generate annual revenue of $10 billion and earnings of $10 a share within the next five years, the analyst wrote.

AOL members appear to shop online more often than people who access the Web directly, according to a company release. About 48 per cent of AOL subscribers have made a purchase online, up from 42 per cent last January, said Wendy Brown, AOL's vice-president for commerce.

Traffic to AOL sites specialising in toys has more than quadrupled from last year, the company said, while traffic to clothing store sites has more than tripled.

CompuServe, the online service that AOL purchased earlier thisyear, reported shoppers on its service will spend an average of $319 on online purchases this holiday season.

Since CompuServe's Shopping Channel debuted last month, traffic has increased tenfold, the company said.

iMac performs well for the price
The iMac is a moderately powerful computer that can hold its own against similarly priced low-end PCs, writes The Washington Post. It has several minuses, though, that are potential deal breakers for business users. The monitor and CPU are encased in a compact, egg-shaped unit that you can pick up and carry around by a moulded handle. It resembles the Mac Classic and has the same disadvantages.

The main flaw is lack of an upgrade path. That means, if you need a larger monitor than the built-in 15-incher, too bad. And if something goes wrong with the monitor, be prepared to give up the entire system.

Now for the big plus. The iMac's setup was so easy, a 5-year-old could do it. In less than three minutes after opening the box, one can plug the mouseand keyboard into Universal Serial Bus ports, plug the system into a power outlet and boot up.

The 233-MHz Power G3 processor comes with a 512K cache, 32 megabytes of memory and a 66-MHz system bus. The iMac can simulate an additional 36 megabytes of memory via disk caching. Virtual memory is a cheap way to get more memory, but it causes excessive disk writing and shortens system life.The iMac's stereo speakers with surround sound suffered from the same underpowered quality as most other embedded speakers. Audio CDs sounded poor unless you stood directly in front of the speakers, and even then the bass notes got lost, making recordings sound tinny. Sounds from the Web or program-generated sounds were functional.

Because of the iMac's entry-level price, one expected poor graphics. But it was a big surprise: a built-in Rage IIc 2-D/3-D graphics chip from ATI Technologies Inc. of Thornhill, Ontario, and 2 megabytes of synchronous graphics memory.

But the biggest complaint was the circular mouse, half thelength and width of a standard mouse. Users with small hands could easily envelop the entire unit.

Taken as a whole, the iMac is a good system that performs well for the price. But business users should be cautious about choosing it over low-end PCs.