"Wow, from no computer to a cable modem!!!!! We've come a long way 'eh Archie!"

I don't know about "we" Andy, but "I" certainly have! Never whould I have thought that I would become this involved in the "e-information age"! Actually, it was a matter of additional space needed and a very reasonable price that drove me to upgrading.

The brand new HP my son gave me, three years ago, had a 2gb hard drive and 16 ram memory with Windows 95. The 633mhz HP me version computer package which included a monitor and printer that I just purchased on sale for well under $700 after rebates at the Wiz, has a 15 gig hard drive with 64 ram of memory.

I was having a lot of problems installing the driver disk for the cable modem in the old computer (that just got "fixed" after taking a lightning hit) and the on-site tech who got it back up and running said that if I upgraded to Windows 98 that whould probably take care of the "you have performed an illegal operation" problems I've had with the old machine... even before it got hit. Well rather than do that, since I needed the extra space for my catalogs A.C. Newsletters, New Issues Service information, mailing lists, billing records, club stuff, etc. I decided that the roughly $700 bucks was worth it. Plus the cable ISP costs only $29.95 per month for a 2 year contract and I can get rid of AOL and it's busy signals and routine drop outs and I no longer need a 2nd dedicated phone line bill to pay each month..... not to mention the almost instant access to the bb's and equally as fast response when I click on a message.

The only downside was that I couldn't obtain a new version of my personalized AOL email address. I can set up four sub-users with their own email addresses after the main address of ablack2optonline.com. The reason I'm responding to your post on AOL is that I'm currently in the process of extracting all the files off this "old" machine which I want to keep and installing them on the new one when I'm done making about 50 or so floppy copies.