Good reminder. Santa brought me a portable hard drive that plugs into a USB port and all the iris photos went on first. I know CD's have a shelf life so cannot fully trust them. Bummer. I'm interested in how you used Excel for a garden layout. Is it too complicated to explain?

I am always amazed when people say they have loads of photos or music that they do not want to lose or cannot replace yet have never backed up these valuables. If your hard drive fails tomorrow you have a very real problem. You are not alone in this and I am not trying to be mean spirited but if you fail to look after you and your possessions then who will? For less than $50 you can buy a name brand DVD-RW and for under $20 you can buy 100 blank DVDs. You can buy a lesser amount of blanks of course, that is a choice you can make. The DVD will come with software you install to use it. Or if you already have blank CDs you could use those in the DVD burner. If you back some of that stuff up and remove it from this computer it may well run faster because you will have more free space on the hard drive for the swap file to work better. Does your activity light come on frequently and stay on for long periods? If so this is an indication the swap file is have a problem. Then if you really want to get carried away you can visit Big Lots where they have (or did recently in the Buffalo, NY store) CD or DVD labels and the software to create your own labels for $10 or $11. Another option would be to install this hard drive as a slave in the new computer you intend to buy. You would need to check that there are compatible data connections in the new computer. Older hard drives are IDE or ATA but the newer and faster technology is SATA.

carbonite is a legit company and is a good back up option, if you go through Kim Komando's site you can get a discounted price for carbonite which is one of her sponsors. It is most often used as a full back up option to back up everything you have of value on your pc. Which everyone should have some type of back up plan in existence. If you only want to back up pictures there are many ways to do that, including putting them on cd's, or a separate external hard drive, or you can use an online storage facility and keep copies there. Adrive for example provides a very large free space to store files, I use it. what windows operating system are you using? and what browser?

Thank you both for the quick responses ! :-) RC, I didn't want to try that (on my own) only because I was afraid of losing something permanently that I might need later. No matter.... Zep's suggestion did the trick ! I don't know whether it was the safe mode or just the reboot (which I hadn't tried), but the file has been successfully deleted and the RB emptied. Thanks again ! :-)