Kudzu9, I think I will have my answer tomorrow morning when I check my ISP useage log but I am now fairly confident my issue is inhouse. Snidely, yes this kid needs the bar raised, and perhaps my daughter too. We are not often fortunate enough to enjoy fireside chats only carefully chosen words. Ravencajun, wow you got me all excited there for a minute or three ha ha. Never knew about router logs till now and a Worldstart tutorial lead me along. That was when I realised I had disassociated the WiFi early today, saved and by doing so wiped the old logs. Only today's activity is visible. But I will keep that neat tid bit for future reference for sure. Thank you. The Dlink router does not seem to offer the amount of information suggested by the Worldstart tutorial though. Cheaper router, less bells and whistles I suppose.

I think we have been jumping back and forth between specifics of my particular post and questions posted in general. I don't have enough experience in this computer forum to really add anything to any general discussion beyond my own personal, very minor experiences, so I will go back to the specifics of my post and my own situation. In the past, when I was a Windows PC user, I was an intermittent visitor to a number of computer forums, not this one very often, because of low traffic here, but all the forums had very friendly people who were generous with their time and expertise and seemed happy to help. Since switching to an Apple computer, I have barely stepped foot in a computer forum. I have not needed to. My laptop just works 90% of the time and when it doesn't, I have a 3 yr tech support policy in place. Something I've had with every computer I've ever had since I first started getting on the computer in 1995. It has been a big relief, because maintaining a computer and straightening out technical problems even with help was a very frustrating task that I never enjoyed. It always felt like a 'big black hole' of wasted time when some issue would present itself. Even with an 'expert' to help figure it out, you'd never know how many hours you'd have to take away from whatever task you were trying to do, to stop and figure out why the computer wasn't responding right, 'again'. Or how many days your computer would not be working. Even with a tech support policy, I might call and get the wrong information and no fix with two techs, and have to call back again and then a third tech might know just what the problem was and fixed it in about 10 minutes. So, even though I was less technically literate, it seemed like even among the technically literate, there were a lot of people who seemed as confused as I was. I always tried to understand what I needed to know. Always tried to find out what I could do using the computer that would be preventative and avoid problems. It didn’t seem to matter, tech problems always seemed to present themselves regardless. So again, I can’t even express how relieved I’ve been not to have that experience with my computer any more. My husband has a windows based computer with Vista on it and I don’t even want to touch it. Which brings me to my thread that seems to have triggered this discussion. I wasn’t even asking for help with a problem with my computer. I had already been working with my own situation for 3 days and taken steps to resolve it not only with GW but with my own Apple tech support. I was not satisfied with the responses or information that I was getting from either about whether this ‘downloaded file’ was a problem or not. That was why I posted here. And from the information that ravencajun offered, it would seem that I had reason to remain concerned about the ‘possibility’ that it could be a problem and one I wanted to take steps to avoid in the future. Even if the file that was downloaded onto my computer was not a problem, it might have been. So, what was it about my thread that has caused a negative response? What did I do or say that was wrong? I’m still here defending my thread, why? Have I even done any of the things that some of you are expressing you have a problem with? I was very appreciative for the help ravencajun gave me and I even tried to smooth over my initial response to Mike, even though I still think he was wrong in both content and attitude in his response to me, I was more than willing to give him a break and overlook it. At this point, I am at a loss to understand how what seemed like a simple question has resulted in my feeling like I have to defend myself for asking it and now defending all people who come to forums and ask questions. That doesn't seem right to me.

Have you purchased songs and/or video that are protected? If so, you'll also want to make sure you decommission the old PC AFTER transferring the songs and videos. With protected content, there's a limit to how many devices it can be copied to. I don't think decommission is the right word, but it's something like that. It frees that license so you can transfer to another computer. One way I've done it is to just copy the itunes folder in My Music to an external drive, then copy that to the new computer.

The big differences are: - what formats the player can play. Only the iPod will play music from the iTunes Music Store -- which does about 80% of the industry's business in legal music downloads. In addition, the iPod will play MP3s. Many iPods also can play video in specific formats (including TV show episodes, music videos, etc.). - what accessories are available: cases, add-ons like FM transmitters and cables for car use, clock radios which can play music from an iPod, etc. The iPod is by far the most popular MP3 player out there, so there is a much larger accessory market. I dare say there's next to nothing out there for the RCA now and there will be absolutely nothing in a couple of years when that particular model is out of production. MP3s can come from numerous sources. Millions of people download MP3s illegally. Many download from digital-music services like Rhapsody (but be careful: on many sites like that you only subscribe to the music and never own it -- quit paying for the subscription or watch the company pull the plug on it and your music library goes *poof*). Some Web sites (like NPR's and those of popular bands) offer MP3 files you can download and listen to. You also can play your own CDs/cassettes/LPs into your computer and send them to your MP3 player. There are some other nice MP3 players out there. Creative's Zen is fairly nice. But many big companies, like Sony, Microsoft, and Wal-Mart, have tried to kill the iPod and have failed utterly. You may save some money by buying something other than an iPod, but you're gambling on the player being fixable when the battery dies or needs service. As far as I know, there are no other MP3 players which can play video. Frankly, considering the capabilities of most iPods relative to the competition, they are fairly priced and they work very well, with Apple's usual attention to how you interact with the device. I don't see much point in buying anything else. Something else will be cheaper, but you'll be reminded of that in a dozen ways. Besides, iPods have that essential element of "cool" that RCA and other brands just don't have. There's someone else posting in this thread who bought Dell's player (another company which could not compete with Apple) last year and ended up buying an iPod this year anyway. Good luck!