I have 398 MHz 256 MB of Ram on this computer. I'm showing capacity 74.4 GB . Used space 12.3 GB and free space 62.0 GB. I have no idea what all this means except that my pie still has lots of pink and I DO know that means lots of empty space just don't know if this is enough for all these pictures. bpgreen: Do you think that would be enough space to download all these pictures and put in a folder ? Yes dcarch the floppy's are 1.44 mg. I know what you mean about what are floppy's? I asked the grandkids and great-grandkids for help and they had no idea what I was talking about. When I showed them my floppy's they Wanted to know how to put that in their laptop's. Guess I'm getting older by the day but I won't give up trying to learn. lol Thanks to both of you for the quick and easy to understand response and hope I can get this done. That is my project for the day. Probably more like a week or month. lol Thanks again. Have a nice day.

I took a quick look at a review for the InstantMusic box and it is just the kind of thing I'm talking about. I actually have a stereo system (receiver, turntable, cassette deck, CD player) hooked up to an Onkyo audio hub (no longer made) which then feeds my Macintosh. Works great. Mine just converts to bits, and the software I use has to convert into the various music formats; this goes one step further. For $40 or so, it looks like just the ticket. The various music formats. There are a bunch of them. AAC, MP3, and WMA are the most popular. AAC is the format used on iPods and Apple's iTunes by default. Apple claims that AAC results in better-sounding files that are the same size as MP3 files. I don't know anyone who has a particular opinion on that, though I'm sure this is discussed to death elsewhere on the Internet. Music you buy from the Apple iTunes Music Store also is AAC-encoded. One disadvantage is that music from the iTunes Music Store has additional coding that makes it difficult to move those files to a non-Apple player (the main exception being iTunes for Windows). MP3 is the more generic format. iPods can play MP3s as can digital audio players from whoever is left in the business (Apple owns about 80% of the legal digital music business). WMA is a Windows Audio format. I don't know a lot about WMA other than Microsoft would prefer you use it. :-) I have not heard that it sounds significantly better or worse than any other format (including ones I haven't mentioned here); the big issue with WMA is that if you're not using a Windows-based system for playback, it will be harder for you to find a player for WMA-encoded files. Not impossible; just harder. It's not as popular a format as AAC or MP3. The general things to remember about digital audio formats are 1) that the smaller the file, the less good it sounds. That may not be a big deal if you're listening through iPod earbuds or a portable speaker or your cell phone -- it may sound just fine through those devices. It might be a bigger deal if you pipe your music to a quality home stereo. But it costs you pretty much nothing to try it for yourself; and 2) unless you have access to an "uncompressed" digital file of the music (or the original record/tape/CD), once you "rip" it into one of these formats, converting it to another format often causes some audible damage to the file. Then there's the labor that entails. So you might want to think just a bit about the format in which you want your music. It would be a pain to have to convert hundreds of files if you decide to move to another player that can't handle your chosen format.

Ive heard the same thing about CD's. And I too doubt that those Gold CD's were first produced in 1977 so they could begin testing.... I usually back up my full size images onto an external HD (they are VERY affordable now, and some can hold up to 500GB), and then resize them and keep my smaller ones on my internal HD It really is a fear of mine to have all the pics I have taken get wiped out... I would look into the external HD...

Did you format the discs? It all depends on your software and the CD Drive. Some drives and software will format as they write, but you then may have to manage 'closing' and 'opening' a disc. I keep a few formated discs around so that I can burn a file in a jiffy when I need to. I use re-writable discs and format those as "data" discs. Once formatted, those will operate just like and other data drive. Everything is different when you use a CR write-once disc. Carefully read the CD Drive manual. If you have been sucessful in the past, it may be as you suspect; The drive is dying. Just a thought: Check to see if the blank disks are compatible with your drive. Look at the rating of the write speeds. For example, if your drive is rated for 1X to 4X speed and the disks are 6X to 16X, it is likely that the drive will refuse the disks.