It is likely that your "keep alive" battery is dying. This battery is on the motherboard per the preceding posts. Sometime the first indication of this failure is the date setting becomes in error. In the good old days of PC computing (about 15 years ago) you could get a replacement separate, larger CMOS/Clock battery pack that fastened inside the computer case and plugged onto the motherboard. Old motherboards had a connector for this. Typical battery life back then was 2 to 3 years. My experience with modern boards is the battery may last 2 to 5 years or more. There are a few cases of infant mortality where a battery fails before 6 months.

UPS's constantly monitor the battery and have a small charger built into them to keep the battery juiced perfect. They charge up their batteries after they run down, unless of course the battery has reached its end of life cycle. Some battery types are good for two years, some for longer. Its not a real fast charger, just a little trickle job. The UPS offers surge protection even with a near dead battery. Mine beep like the dickens when their batteries get about 5 years old and one cell dies, as a reminder to go buy some new ones. At power failure every few seconds they beep here - I have several.. its funny - a beep from here where my laptop ac adapter is,, a beep over there on a desktop server, others from behind a door, still another from the router area. Almost like synchronized music that drives me nutty Power failure in the dark of nite - there's so many flashing lights you dont need to worry about bumping into walls.

I have the iPod mini, which they no longer make. It was replaced by the nano, which is even smaller and has much longer battery life btw charges. My batteries last about 3 hrs before needing a charge, while they say the Nano's last about 8. I just plug mine in every night along w all the other things that need charged. It is easy to transfer CD music to your iPod, as Steve said. You use software (iTunes or other free software that's out there) -hubby uses some other free software for that. This converts your CD's into a format that iTunes can recognize. Then you just drag and drop the tunes or folders into your iTunes library. We each have iPods and named each after ourselves, so that we have a master library w everything in it, and then created separte places for "his" or "hers" tunes. It's much less complicated than it sounds. Honest. Have you ever had a PDA, such as a palm pilot or anything else that requires you to synchronize data, such as calendars, email, or whatever between your PC and the device? Well, iPods - using the iTunes software that come with them - work the same way. If you have added new material to your music library on your PC, and you plug your iPod into your USB or firewire (upgraded type of USB ports that most all computers have now and are much faster), iTunes automatically detects your iPod and transfers all of the new music over to it. It does this super fast. For 20 tunes it may take less than a minute. You might want to poke around the apple site to see if they have any PDF's of the iPod instruction manuals posted. I am sure they do. A quick read through the basics, and also the FAQ's and pictures they show of the iTunes library will help clear up some of your questions and make it easier to visualize what these terrific products do. Better yet, get thee to the local Apple store and have them give you a demo. In our area, the staff are super nice and will explain and demonstrate everything to you. They are set up for that. The only thing you cannot do, is transfer music from an iPod back to the computer (yours or anyone elses). Apple saw to that to prevent pirating/sharing of music. We learned that the hard way after our computer crashed and we did not have a backup of anything in our iTunes library. A lot was from CD's, so that was easy to redo, but we lost some rare british guitar music that hubby had downloaded from emusic.com. It's still there on the iPod, but if he ever plugs it back into the PC, it will write over what he has and put the contents of the new library we built onto it. Re-charging is no big deal at all. If you are going to play music through one of the hundreds of devices with speakers, you sit your iPod in its charging stand and then plug that into a mineature speaker system - or the system has its own stand that you sit the iPod in. Then batteries are not an issue, since it runs off of the speaker system power, not its batteries. The only time you are using the batteries is when you are away and using the iPod w the headphones. I travel between the East and West coast a great deal and cannot live w/o mine. It gets me through all those long bumby rides in cramped quarters and I can relax or work on the laptop while listing to what I want to hear. Once checked into the hotel, I get out my 3 charging devices: iPod, Blackberry, and Bluetooth cordless headset (for my blackberry/cell phone). Oh, and my digital camera if I happen to bring it. Everything gets charged during the evening so they are ready to go for the next day. I believe all the iPods they are selling today, come with their charging stands and of course, all the cords you need. I HATE the headphones they provide though. They give me an earache (hard plastic w rubber things that keep falling off and they get lost in the first week anyway). But they have some other nice ones with much better design, so that's what I did in the first week - got rid of the awful headphones. Must-haves today are Tivo, XM satellite radio (we have 4), and iPods. Let us know what you end up getting. These are the best thing Apple has ever come up with in terms of functionalitiy, design, and price point. L

Big ole plops of raindrops off and on all night. Now raining 'normally' off and on. DH wants a short ceasefire so he can take his walk around the condo property (23 acres on a hillside). The mynahs are arguing over shelter in one preferred palm on the lawn beyond our lanai while the doves are choosing the big monkeypod farther down the hill. I won't need to 'discourage' the quail with the squirt gun this morning. I have a load of DH's clothes in the washer being de-chocolate-ed. Chocolate chip cookies "melt in your hand" here...fast. We have cookies at teatime matinee. We are dividing "The Company You Keep" into two afternoons. Gosh this movie reminds us we are part of 'history' along with the Weathermen. DH was an Andy Frain usher at the Dem. convention -- an arm's length from Da Mayor as he urged the cops to beat war protesters in Grant Park. Young people today don't have the same intimate involvement in our nation's wars that we all had during the Draft. Mercenary armies are not good for nations, IMO. Oops! Sorry for the 'serious stuff'. Yes, Patti, I need to make lists. I am not an easy hostess. Don't know whether that's because I seldom entertain or the reason. Have a good visit!