Ah, Sandy. I still have OS 8.6 functional on a Mac II CI. Still, I don't ever use the machine anymore, because it is soooooo slow! On the other hand, my Power Mac G4 400, is now an "old" machine also, and I have upgraded the OS to vs. 10.2.8, but that's as far as I can go, without a new machine. It is a never ending money pit, but new machines are unavoidable, just to stay connected to the web and email. Even your ISP will not support systems but sooooo old, and if you want things to work well, you are forced to upgrade at some point. I can tell you that you won't need anything more than an iMac, today, to get very adequate capabilities on a Mac. I can also tell you that the price gap between wintel and Mac has all but disppeared, if you compare functionality to funtionality. In fact, at work, I actually had to pay more for a Dell, that did the same job as a Power Mac G5. (smile) If you have an Apple store anywhere near you, it might be worth checking a new machine out. (Or a Fry's superstore, although they won't be able to offer as much help to you, as the Apple store, in looking at what the new machines will do.) Otherwise, my favorite on-line folks are Small Dog. Best support out there.....including Apple. (smile)

sorry to take so long but have been away from the computer. Thank each of you for your thoughts. Mikey-I went to options and changed my home page and now it only opens the one I set it to. Which is great. I thought I'd done something bad and it's been doing it awhile. Chuggerguy- no, it's not the last ones I had open. Kudzu-yes, it was the same ones every time. The loading is doing fine now thanks to all of you. Ravencajun -I'm just using the regular backup program that came on my computer and have never been able to get it to work from the git go. I get that the backup was not successful. could not backup for following reasons System Restore Changed backup settings. Revised backup settings (0X810000ED) I was supposed to back up on C: Drive. Does this tell anything about what to do about the backup? I'll try to get more info if you need it but I may need you to tell me how. Thank you all so much. Nancy

First of all let's clear this up. Opera works fine with Vista. I've had Opera on my Vista machine since I got it and use Opera on every one of my computers. I know a lot of people using Opera on Vista. Any claim that it won't work on Vista is pure malarkey. If you're having trouble, you have other issues, but don't make the best browser in the world the scapegoat. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, (maybe millions?) of people are using Opera with Vista, and very happily. One of my favorite features is the X & Z keys for forward and back, rather than the combination of keys or using the mouse. I have the menu button and customized toolbar so I get maximum screen space. It's such a fast browser. In fairness, there's some pages out there written poorly so they don't always appear quite right in Opera, but Opera has adjusted. Then of course there's the sites, like the big one whose name shall not be said, who "borks" the sites. While yes, Opera is "different" from the Internet Elephant, Firefox, K-meleon, Netscape, Safari and other browsers are also "different" from the Internet Elephant. And what's more, they're different from each other. Ford is different from Chev, and they're both different than BMW, but that doesn't mean they're not all very similar in operation. Don't be afraid to try something "different". How does my computer know which one I want to open my sites with? The computer (and you have input) sets a key on a "default" program to use to open certain file types. For instance it may set Adobe Reader to Open .PDF files. And you might set a different media player to open .WAV files. These are easily changed if you like. If I download Opera and like it, how do I go back and forth between it and FF? If you have them open at the same time, simply use ALT+TAB or click on the taskbar to switch programs. Otherwise, you might have it automatically open in the browser of your choice or open up the program like you open any other. I would suggest using shortcuts in Quicklaunch for fast access rather than tie up your desktop or start menu. How would I go back to FF and uncheck to not make it the default browser? There's a setting in each of the browsers in Options for them to check each time to see if they're the default browser. You can just disable that option. ALSO, if I uncheck that box, does it list the other browsers so I can pick the one I want to make default? Not in the browser itself, but if you do a shift+right click and bring up "Open With", you can choose any program to open the selected file. I heartily recommend you give Opera a try. But give it a month or two so you get used to it. Do a search for "Opera Tips" and get a feel for some of the special features. You can customize it a lot or a little. It's far superior to Firefox in that Firefox requires the addition of so many add-ons to make it reasonably functional and all of the features are already in Opera. Not saying Firefox is bad, but it's really essentially an Opera Wannabe. However there are a lot of cool add-ons that can make Firefox unique too. I often run 3 browsers at the same time. One for surfing, one for monitoring a webmail account and sometimes the third if there's an issue with the others. Oh, and yes, there is one issue I have with Opera. I can't pay my phone bill using it. I have problems with Firefox too. But K-meleon works fine. I don't remember the last time I had to open the Internet Elephant. Another advantage of Opera: The elephant requires patches all the time. All browsers do. But the whole new Opera install is less than 6mb where IE's patches are often 3 times that. Makes a big difference if you're on dialup.

I don't know if this could be the problem, if the toolbar that's missing is the top one in Richard's photo that says Firefox, File, Edit, View...etc...but a couple of times when that has disappeared, I couldn't figure out how to make it appear again, then discovered that I'd clicked on the green button in the top left corner (who knows why) and it expands to full screen eliminating the tool bar. The only way to find it again (for me) is to hover my cursor up near the very top of the page and the toolbar appears but won't stay showing. I have to click again on the green button to make it return to the normal view. I know it's basic knowledge for some, but if you don't know that it can be very frustrating.