arosegirl if you use word do not delete your office that is part of office, they are very expensive programs so I would not think you want to delete them. Make sure once you delete things and know you are sure you want them gone (wait a day or so) then also empty your recycle bin or it will not free up any room. However how many programs and the amount of space taken up on the pc is not what is slowing you down, they are taking up space on your hard drive, we are talking about the amount of RAM memory that you have on the pc and in your specs you said you had 504MB RAM that is a very low amount you should have at least 1 gig which is double what you have. Run the belarc which is free and it will tell you what kind of RAM you need and how much you can put in the pc. Once you run the belarc tell us the model number and brand of the pc so we can show you the type of ram you need.

my guess and I do mean guess is that it was a conincidence that it failed right after doing the updates, for DA it was not a drive failure but a corrupted/failed Operating system. It could be due to the fact the drive they provided you was not a new drive, but drives that are brand new sometimes fail. There is an old trick for trying to save info from a failed drive you might want to try it, you freeze the drive literally put it in the freezer,wrap it in paper towels put it in a sealed ziplock baggie, let it freeze well(a few hours or over night), stick it in the enclosure, or plug into the pc, and as fast as possible try to access it and grab your info, it will not work for long but many times it will work long enough to get the info off of it. Usually the window is about 15 mins. You can make it last longer if you put a frozen container or those blue ice packs on top of the drive when you take it out and connect it to the pc (protect it from moisture of course). Have a flash drive or some backup drive ready to go to get that info backed up immediately. You can repeat this a few times if you are lucky. Why freezing a hard drive might help on this site scroll way way down below all the blue text to read the info on how to and why freezing might work. does the drive spin at all? can you hear it spin up? is there any clicking or noise, does your pc recognize or see the drive? If it is spinning then freezing it is not the way to go because a spinning drive is not a dead drive. IF you want to try Spin Rite by Steve Gibson here is the site for it. SpinRite also this link talks of options to try including the freezer technique. Here is a link that might be useful: freezer technique and more

Thats the laying down in bed mode. To lay the other way, or to set the stand on your head mode,,, try,,,, Ctrl + Alt + Arrow ...key combo. Or look in Contol Panel for your graphic card.. settings there to turn that off usually.

I love a mystery. I vacuumed out my tower this morning. I still had a problem where some websites would open and some would just be blank....with that yellow triangle warning down in the left hand corner. Soooo I did a system restore back a couple of days. Right now, everything is working fine. The only thing I can think of is that I interrupted an uninstall of a trial version of Adobe 8 Pro and didn't finish the uninstall. That's the only odd thing that I can think of. Mystery is the bell. That would denote a hardware problem to me....but...? And I couldn't find one single reference to a bell ringing in the tower (except real bells in real towers, LOL). I can't be the only person with a bell in my puter. It's not under warranty anymore so I'll just take a wait and see attitude for now. Thanks all for your comments.