This could be long... woke at 330am to flashing lights. Front porch light, fluorescent mini twin tube thing, has decided its disco time. Windows has many programs that run as 'Services' in the background. They all have Start/Stop buttons on them but pressing that Stop or Start, might make an UtOh. Some will start at boot others start only when something manually triggers it. Some of the Services are important things windows can't live without. One way to access 'Services' is the 'Computer Management' window. You should look around in there, & Manage things. Interesting place. Its Event Viewer will solve all your window problem... heh/ at least tell you the UtOh's. -- Disk Management is there, it'll help you defrag or change a drive letter. -- Device Manager is there too, look and fix hardware problems or update a driver. Computer Management window, I look in its event viewer often when problems arise, always in hope the link there that will take me directly to windows support will have the magical fix. Sometimes it does, sometimes not. ~ Yes I have installed and have used AdAware2007. Used AdAwareSE for many years and when the newer 2007 version came out I immediately started using it. I have never thought of 2007 version as much different from AdAwareSE. Just a newer version - To me its the same old thing, only it does start as a service -- and, for the Free version there's really no reason for that service to always be running in the background as the free AdAware doesn't do full time spyware protection like the paid version does. Might as well set that Service to Manual so it doesn't start up except on demand. Saves a small amount of memory by not running. If I remember right, frp, back in the day.... I dunno, a yr ago? .. AdAware said uninstall SE completely before installing 2007. Uninstall is a simple no brainer from the Add/Remove in control panel. No special considerations needed. Install of AdAware2007 is about as complicated as making sure you get the Free Version otherwise its a no brainer too. Sounds like you have been happy with SE... If I were you I'd just unistall SE (if its the Free version), and install the Free verion AdAware 2007. Leave the service running always in the background ? really doesn't use a lot of RAM/memory, but it uses some so its a coin toss whether change the service to manual or not. If you dont have another program doing full time spyware protection, you should consider finding one. My choice is Windows Defender, its free and simple. , please

I thought I had upgraded to IE7 at one point. Yahoo wants me to upgrade to IE8, but after reading about it here, I was reluctant to do so. I did go to windows updates last week to see if there were any I needed to do, but after scanning it said there were none. How do I get IE 7?

Hi, snidely, I appreciate the continued food for thought re: my Windows user account password situation. :-) :-) OTOH, I'm not sure your comments reflect the conventional wisdom (at least in the online articles I've been reading, as I try to keep an open mind about these things): 1. Just because "anyone wishing entry can easily enter" doesn't mean one should make it easy for the attackers. "Anyone wishing entry can easily enter" your home and/or car as well. Are you saying you yourself, therefore, never lock your car doors or the door and windows of your home ? Are you saying your email account password is "password" ? Most people say, "Make it as hard as possible for the hackers to get at your information." I tend to agree. 2. You're right -- I don't back up my phone conversations. But not backing up emails goes against just about everything I've ever read on basic email safety/security. We all have emails that we would surely not miss if they were gone for good. Apparently, none of yours is very important. You may be one of those "read and delete" types of email readers. That's fine. (In fact, that's the way I am with my RSS feeds.) But... many other people have important information in email messages, in saved online files, etc. That's why such online services as Google, Hotmail/Skydrive, etc. have such large storage to begin with, no ?.... So that people can keep things they want/need to keep. And the email companies themselves back up your email as a precaution and advise users to do the same (via forwarding to second account, using offline client, etc.). 3. I'm not so much concerned about someone getting by Aunt Helen's email address as I am someone hacking into my account and using my email address to send something to her (virus, porn, phishing email, etc.). If my contacts see a message coming from me (or presumably so), they're more likely to open it. That could spell trouble. Again, it's a matter of basic precautions against stuff we don't want to deal with. And that's another reason why I'm moving in the direction of having all my contacts/emails offline.... so that anyone getting into my online webmail account/interface will find nothing there to work with: no contact addresses, no emails stored, no online files, etc. Everything will be offline and backed up further on CD. 4. I'm not so sure the myriads of people who have had their email accounts compromised, emails deleted, contacts bombarded with spam, porn, virus-laden emails, etc. -- and many of whom have written about the nightmare of trying to recover the account -- and the emails) -- would call it all a "slight inconvenience." Again, Mat Honan's recent experience is frightening, and so are the stories of many others. Anyway, I truly appreciate your perspective. I always want to hear the different sides of an issue so I know I'm not missing an 'angle' on whatever I'm thinking about. :-) Btw.... how did you know I have an Aunt Helen ? ;-)

In my eMachine, in the Bios I can check the temperature, have you done this? Below is what I posted earlier. If your computer is getting hot it will cut off to protect the PC. If I had your computer I would want to know if your problem is in the hard drive or some were else. If you put your hard drive into another computer as a slave you can do 2 things. Error Checking and Copy your files to a CD. You can buy a hard drive enclosure for about $40.00 or less that will plug into a USB. This will allow you to remove your files. I'm not sure about running Error Checking from an enclosure. Ask someone. This website explains hard drives http://computer.howstuffworks.com/adding-a-hard-drive.htm ----------------------------------------------------------- If you need an Install CD for your computer, call or email them. I bought one for mine for $20.00 from eMachine. --------------------------------------------------- If you can get an extra hard drive (Remove the old one) and use the eMachine Install CD (that you mention) the first thing your computer will want you to do is go online and Register it. You won't be allowed to use the computer except to Register. Just let the computer set and run, if it doesn't cut off than I would say the problem is in your hard drive. Or take the computer to a repair shop. Their getting $65.00 just to check a computer out were I live. ----------------------------------------------------- Check the temperature in the Bios. By tapping F2 Key when you start of. I'm giving my temperature as an example. CPU 38c degrees Current System Temp. 35c degrees ------------------------------------------- CPU Fan Speed 2483 RPM System Fan Speed 1332 RPM