I am going to get a whole house surge protector. But should I also invest in getting "good" surge protectors for my electronics (tv and related peripherals, computer and peripherals?). If so, could someone point me toward a good one. I wouldn't know what makes a surge protector good (and think just getting expensive is not the way to make the selection). I do have surge protectors in all those areas, but don't think we selected them with any real knowledge. Thank you. Lynn. PS - and my efforts to copy are delayed - bc. I can't find the replacement drive. We received so many packages last week - and during the power outage - so I was opening and putting things away by flashlight - and so far, I can't find it. have this scary feeling that my husband or cleaning woman thought the box was trash and tossed it out. Hope not.

Now even I had to look up an acronym - SIL. ;-) Ok, so you have MS Works XLR & WPS files. The problems you are having - or going to have - is that Works is old, and the Office XP Pro your SIL gave you is also old, being actually Office 2002, version 10 of Office. If you don't have too many files, I think your best bet is to try an online file converter. Zamzar claims to be able to open and convert Works files. http://www.zamzar.com/ Save : XLR (spreadsheet) files to xlsx WPS (word) files to docx If you don't want to buy a new version of MS Office, try installing LibreOffice - the newer version of OpenOffice - and it will open xlsx and docx files [ If you want to stick with your SIL's MS Office XP Pro, then convert those files to xls & doc files, respectively. That version of Office is very old though. ] There are other ways of handling this, but probably if you you're going to try anything else, your best bet would be buy MS Works off Ebay or Amazon for $10 or so, open and convert all the files. Btw, you can't even open a .doc file in Office XP Pro ?? That's not a good sign - probably a sign of corruption. Btw #2 - When you say you can't open files, I take it they are on your current hard drive, and not within some compressed backup folder. That is, not within a zip file or the like. Re your backup cds : Can you load one of them, then rummage around in their files and tell us what you find ? (as in, names of files and extensions ?) Most likely they are proprietary formats, but if we know what they are, we could perhaps tell you how to retrieve them. Last, anyway you can get the hard drive back from the repair service ? Probably not, but it would be a second source of backup files. Let us know how it all works out.

Your bigger problem will be the drivers. Get those first and save to external media. Assuming this is a store bought computer and not a home build you can use any XP Home CD to install the operating system. The difference is when it comes time to add the 25 digit code you use the one fixed to the computer case and not the one on the CD. After loading XP grab some security then go for the XP updates, there are well over 100 to install and most will install automatically. About half way through IE8 pops up asking you to instal and stops all progress until you give it instructions.

You should plan on getting an external hard drive to back everything up on. The thumb drive things are good for putting a report on or just a few documents you want to take between home and office, but really not a long-term solution for backing up everything. Because you have a couple of transfers to make, I'd find a good computer store to do it for you. When you're ready to trash your old computers, look to see if your county has recycling programs or if there is a computer recycling company in your area. For a very small fee, they will take your CPUs and crush those hard drives into a million pieces. Security issue solved! (I live in Northern Virginia and used PC Recycling in Chantilly, Va.--you could look at the website to get a feel for what to Google to find a similar place in your neck of the woods.)