Definitely agree on the "old Windows box = increasing brain rot" statement. I think that's what Doug is running into, not a hardware issue. It is rare to get more than two years of performance out of a Windows system without having to reinstall the OS. Not "repair" it ... reinstall it clean from scratch. And it does take a few days to get everything back to normal after that. I keep all my documents, important data, printers, photography, music, etc. on a Slackware Linux box and make that available to the Windows boxes via samba. The routine Windows OS reinstallations on the client computers are less painful that way, but still painful. However, I do admit some glee in walking up to one of my Windows boxes on it's deathbed and running "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=63" from a LiveCD. There's something immensly satisfying in doing that!