And don't spend more than about $5-$6 for a cable. Many walk-in stores will charge a ridiculous amount for cables. As you can see from the link below, you can get ethernet cables of up to 100' in this price range. For travel, you may want to pick one that is lighter weight: the thicker ones are sturdier, but may be a bit heavy if you get a really long one. Here is a link that might be useful: Ethernet cable

There may be some insight at the link provided Here is a link that might be useful: discussions.apple

Compress Old Files doesn't delete any files from the drive. It compresses files that Windows hasn't accessed for a specified period of time. I have 2,597,426. You can check everything in disk cleanup, won't hurt anything. You've got more serious problems with the "No IDE fixed drive present" It means the computer is not seeing a hard drive. If you can ever get it to boot again, open My Computer, right click Local Disk (C:) / Properties, click the Tools Tab, under error checking/check now, put a check in both boxes and start. Hopefully that might fix something. To me it sounds like the hard drive has died or the ide ribbon has come loose from the hd.

Sounds like you've just about declared it dead :) If it is, it is, but I just wanted to try to narrow it down, and I didn't want to throw money around willy-nilly in the hopes of figuring out what the problem is. Your search took me to Ebay Canada. I took the liberty of changing the .ca to .com to get Ebay US, but with the same search. Why pay extra shipping if I don't have to? Like I said, I'm a novice at this, so I may not be entirely sure what I'm looking at, but from what I've noticed, I only clicked on the ones that had 3 memory slots (I have three sticks, so might as well use them), and from what I could tell, all the ones I looked at were listed as used, and total with shipping they still came darned close to $90. I did see this one below which ends in the morning (hopefully nobody here will sabotage me and bid against me!) and comes with a CPU which is slower than mine. I don't know the difference between a K8N-E and a K8N4-E. At least in the one I showed you earlier this morning, the MB was used, but the CPU that came with it was an UPGRADE to the one I have now. In fact, it's the fastest chip that can go in that board. The chip by itself (ATHLON 3400 CPU, 754 socket) is selling for $25US anyway on Ebay. I just thought overall, the whole repair would be cheaper, since I can replace my CPU for under $10, but if the going price of these motherboards means I'm going to wind up paying (total with shipping) $80-$90 anyway for a used board with no CPU, I just as well get the one with the 3400 in case my CPU is fried as well, correct? Thank you again, and forgive me if I'm being presumptuous. I just want to make sure I'm understanding correctly. If I'm wrong in any way, feel free to slap my wrist. Here is a link that might be useful: K8N4-E on ebay