I believe the long-term prospects for the US economy are bleak. Regardless of who is president, what the deficit is, etc. the country's infrastructure is largely dependent on oil. Oil is a finite resource, that is going to go nowhere but up in price over the long-term. We have missed the boat on implementing forms of alternative energy - should have been done decades ago, to avert this crisis. I am a single Mom, raising a teen alone, and it makes me a bit nervous. However, I was frugal even as a young person, so tightening the belt is like putting on a familiar old bathrobe. In 2008 I spent a total of $17 on plants - a couple flats of annuals - and approx. $200 on tools, potting soil, etc. at the nurseries. That is significantly less than previous years. Nevertheless, I acquired more plants than ever! How? - Started hundreds of plants from seed via the winter-sowing method, at least 50 species/cultivars I'd never grown before. - Hosted a Spring plant swap and received a couple dozen new types of plants and offloaded a bunch of extras! Win-win. - Ordered 50 more shrub & tree seedlings from the NH State Nursery, for $1 apiece. ONE DOLLAR each. These seedlings are 1-2 years old, so they're smaller than what you would buy in a nursery, but most have grown remarkably fast. They become $20-30 plants in a couple years! State and county organizations are a GREAT source of inexpensive plant stock. - Placed a small order at Bluestone during their June 50% off sale.

Ellie if you only have anti virus you are at risk. I would suggest you get Malwarebytes and SUPERantispyware, both of which are free. These require you to manually update and run scans but they only need doing every one to 3 weeks depending on how conscientious/nervous you are. I never leave my external hard drive connected to the computer. This is both for safety and economy. Connected it is open to attack and also runs all the time. If you have a factory built computer your power supply might be taxed to a degree unless your external drive is self powered. Most today are not self powered I believe. You wrote: If I can't bring my computer up ( that is called a crash or a blue screen) I install my recovery discs first. The CD drive works even if the computer has crashed. There is no real answer to this untill the catastrophic event occurs. You might get clues for days before the event to warn you. There would also be valuable clues in the event of a blue screen of death from the error message displayed. (BSOD) I assume you mean Best Buy replaced a defective hard drive with a new one? What was written on the labels of the disks from BB? That would be a clue as to what they are for. As I noted before recovery disks allow you to take your computer back to the new state it was in when purchased, a backup created on your external drive will return the computer to the state at the time of that backup. Any work saved in between would be lost. You can store your data on the computer itself and back it up to the external drive for protection. Always a good plan to have data you do not wish to lose saved in 2 locations Outlook is generally a part of Microsoft Office although I understand it can be bought as a stand alone program - quite expensive too. One would presume Cobian Backup came with your Go_Flex drive. It is good that you ask these questions but be sure to allow yourself to enjoy the benefit these things can bring you. A computer is only as good as the person sat in front of the keyboard. Urlee and Cat_ky I have no issues with anyone owning more than one computer, I have 6 and all working yet I live alone. But to purchase another computer "just in case" seems rather more than odd to me and a complete waste of money for an item that keeps becoming out of date with alarming regularity. Don expressed it very wisely I think.

Hi jean_mi_z5, Reports inconclusive to me. It's showing a lot of system file crashes, but those crashes can be caused by 3ed party files / drives causing the Microsoft drivers to crash and I don't see any 3ed party listed. If you're having a lot of blue screens and it appears you are, I strongly recommend you post at the link provided. Under the topic below BSOD, Crashes, Kernel Debugging Here is a link that might be useful: BSOD, Crashes, Kernel Debugging

I agree with Raven here, I would not be taking a Celeron computer in for repair. That might well cost half the price of a new computer. You don't have a friend, neighbour or relative who might loan you their Windows XP CD? Explain to them that you do not need the license number as your license sticker on the side of the computer case is the one you would enter as you install XP. That sticker number is tied to the motherboard in your computer. (I suspect that if you have XP Home then you would need an XP Home CD) Recovery disks are bought at the time of the computer purchase. Or this is more often just a separate partition on your hard drive and the buyer should create a set of recovery disks. This includes all the 'free' extras the computer maker adds on. The XP CD is just that, a copy of Windows XP with nothing added As a side note you may want to suggest to Dad that he creates a set of recovery disks for his machine in case he runs into problems too at some future point.