howdy guys'n'gals sorry i haven't been able to upload th eremaining stories but unfortunately my computer had a small problem........ in the middle of a defrag i suffered a blackout during a storm and it kind of upset things, my computer would detect the modem at start up but would fail to when i attempted to connect to internet............the short side of the story was that one of my serial/com ports had failed, and so had the 5 week old modem, prob even younger, but its going to be fun to get it replaced as my cat, god love him, had been sick on the bag which apparently must have contained the receipt and its been thrown out, grrrrr. My anti spyware program was also up the**** and i was choking on all sorts of lovely junk.......end result.........wipe hard drive and start again........ 5 days later i'm finally back online.........in the process of reinstalling and downloading programs again etc but i promise i will atleast try to get my other stories up there by the end of weekend

OW. I feel for you, having had something similar happen before. At least your modem was external (which I recommend always going with). Our first two were internal, and the second one to get fried took the motherboard with it. >.< To prevent this from happening, I'd look for a surge protector that includes a place for a phone line, as lightning can (and regularly does, apparently) travel through the phone line to your modem. Then, if it happens again, it will only take out the surge protector, which is a whole heck of a lot cheaper to replace than a modem. Anyways, good look with the re-installing.

Good advice, Elvin, but I'd upgrade it to a UPS -- uninterruptible power supply. Basically, it gives you 5 to 15 minutes of power after a power blackout. Enough to close down nicely and copy key stuff to your CD. It's worth doing a bit of research on the UPS, to get the right size. The only downside to a larger one is the cost. Bigger will get you more time and/or let you have more things plugged in. (Note: even a pretty hefty one won't let you run the heater. I wasn't there when the UPS buzzer went off and it took me an entire morning to figure out why I wasn't getting any power; All those things that you're downloading? Save a copy to CD. Uh, now, not during those extra 5 minutes the UPS gets you. I'm serious about that one. Especially Windows service packs and adware-busters and all other "protection" software and updates. One article, they experimented with a brand new machine and got seriously infected in the time it took to download the stuff. Besides, it's a lot easier than having to remember all the programs and go find them again. We also save any registration keys to the same CD. We speak from experience. Hubby's a programmer for a small company; the guy who rescues customers who don't make backups regularly and who don't have UPS's sits beside him. Good luck!

believe it or not the day before the blackout, which i wasn't actually home for, i had purchased and was using a surge protected powerboard....... i had a lightning strike christmas eve and literally fried my modem although my cordless phone, on the same line, was ok..... this time as far as i am aware there was no lightning local.......thats what i get for ducking down to the shops for 5 mins....... with all the crap my machine had been infected with it was easier to start from fresh, that way i knew there was no crap files being reinstalled.........just my emails backed up, and a few fave webpages for resources and my favourites for IE. It also gives me teh opportunity to really look at what i do need to install again and save putting the rarely used programs on again..... I have sp1 and 2 on cd, so that wasn't really an issue, just a pain in the a**s....and then the sp for XP office, after i reinstall it of course...... fun, fun, fun, Everything on the puter was working after, just couldn't get online, and why bother having a puter if you can't get online? lol.

Hmmm...then I'm afraid that you belong in the doomed community of people whom electronics hate. They just commit suicide whenever you come near. Or something. My dad's the expert, not me. I just phone home and go, " Da-ad...what do I *do*?"

hahaha in my case i call a friend but often enough i'm offeringhelp to friends and ppl from work.lol. its pretty bad when u can't sort out your own machine bloody blackouts and power surges, i think safest bet will be to buy a new/2nd hand motherboard and rebuild again, will kill th eserial port problem which i'm not trusting not to spread to neighbouring port, already connection is proving unstable and unreliable...... dammit i wanted to make the call for broadband tomorrow

Ah, well, at least you did what you could. As opposed to some of hubby's clients who get all the advice, even buy the UPS, and leave it in the box for a year.

small update...... the rebuild is complete........up grade from a celeron 400 to an AMD 2200.......woohooo still waiting on getting a molls test on my line to try and find the noise problem, hopefully that will actually happen tomorrow and my god.........what a drama swapping motherboards.......having to reboot from xp cd.........motherboards now being earthed on the tower instead of plastic spacers........not to mention getting heatsink clamps lined up with the motherboard.........