... and this time I hope more than temporarily.

My computer was down again for about 10 days, after another crash which #1 son determined to have resulted from failure of the CPU fan, causing the damn thing to get fried. So, I ordered a whole new mother board (from an outfit called Thompson's Computer Warehouse, or something like that) with a 450 mhz chip. It was DOA, so I went to CompUSA to buy another one, which turned out to have a defective RAM slot, so I had to go buy yet a third one! Which finally worked, which only allowed me to discover that my modem had also gone kaput, so I had to buy a new one of those, too.

In the process, decided to buy a new case, too (for arcane reasons that my son could explain, but I can't -- something about how the pieces fit together in it). And a new mouse (cool Logitech thing with a big red thumbball instead of the regular mouse thing). So, in the various iterations of trying to get this computer fixed, I have now replaced everything except the peripherals (keyboard, monitor, scanner, speakers and printer!).

But, it appears that it is going to work for awhile now; at least until I get my completely new computer (sometime soon -- maybe even later this month).

So, now maybe I can start getting caught up on some of the stuff I'm behind on (though I still don't have access to my old email and other files, as I haven't heard back yet from the outfit that is trying to rescue those from my old backup hard drive). ----- jim o\-S