I am worried that if I go to the larger market that I will lose my niche as a small organic grower and not be able to compete with the other small growers. Ever wonder why every city has "dealer's row" ... a couple of miles of car dealers, side by side? It helps comparison shopping and increases sales for all of them. Same with the larger market - you will be one of many organic growers, but will have far larger numbers of people looking for what you are selling. it's a 'watering hole" and you benefit from the others. Keep your competitive edge by working on being the FIRST with something popular, or by offering less common items. One area to explore would be things used by "ethnic" chefs ... check out the international student population and cater to their recipes and let it be know that you will do it. ASK them what they can't find - locate their Facebook page and ask what things they want to cook with they can't find grown locally. Often it's not something exotic and hard to grow, it's just not being grown.

Owbist, thanks I do like the fast boot on W8 - even with the switch to Desk Top, which to my simple needs is like being back in W7, it is a much shorter wait to start browsing or getting email. Mikie, not sure I "know and love" playing with the BIOS, but in the past I have had occasions to need to. Mostly that goes back to W95 days. Or even the 3.x whatever was before '95. You seem to be suggesting a 3rd party recovery tool. As I noted Gateway provides a tool to image the HDD as well as restore to factory fresh - as I have already uninstalled Norton I assume that would be Factory Fresh less Norton which is fine with me. What I miss was W7 had a DVD boot capability and Toshiba provided me with the tools to create a repair DVD, separate from a restore DVD... I liked that, it prevented me form doing damage by clicking on the wrong button. I suppose the Gateway restore doesn't proved direct access to F8. I do recall tapping F8 during a boot in XP and earlier to get into the BIOS..you seem to be saying (to my reading) that W8 doesn't let one get to the BIOS until the password is satisfied. I don't know if that is different in W7, I have never gone to the BIOS in my W7 machines. I have had to boot the Toshiba notebook off of the Repair DVD a couple of times and it saved my "bacon". On Password, in W7 I could easily change or remove the password.. that seems to be buried deeper in W8. Is it even possible to run W8 without an administrative password protected logon? My giant 17.3" Gateway will likely not be taken out of the house, a password isn't needed - well if a crook breaks into my house it would be better if I has some protection on all computers... problem is W8 ended up with a very complicated password that resulted from my initial start up of the machine..as I recall it had something to do with a password for my Microsoft account, and being external I wanted a secure PW, in fact MS may have required it.

We GC'd our own kitchen reno and it went beautifully. None of ours was DIY, all subtrades were pros, and we were without a kitchen for less than a month. A lot of excellent advice above. We found the keys to success were: 1) Personal recommendations for all the trades. And by that I mean we'd either had personal prior experience with them, or we knew people who had. I don't mean that we called their supplied references, I mean they were referenced from people *we* already knew. If you can't do that re. being new to an area, or other reasons, I would reconsider being your own GC. 2) A lot of pre-planning. We didn't rush into the reno, we planned it in some detail over the course of 6-8 months. We had all the supplies (tile, lighting, sinks, faucets, etc ordered and delivered in advance, and the appliances ordered and paid for with delivery scheduled in advance). We planned the timeline in detail as well which leads to the next point: 3) Once you've started, stick to your schedule RELIGIOUSLY! When you're dealing with many subtrades (in our case there were the electricians, tiler, cabinet maker, gas fitter, quartz fabricator/installer, disposal bin firm, and then contractors who did cab tear-out, plumbing, ductwork for the range, drywalling, appliance install, painting, and a bunch of other things) you have to manage the timeline very carefully. None of these guys are going to care if your project gets delayed for some unrelated reason and you want them to come a few days later at the last minute ... they have jobs lined up for other customers that they need to honor. So if you do NOTHING else, ensure that you have every single thing planned and ready for each trade when they arrive. Because they need to get in and out of your job on time or your are screwed (and by screwed I mean potentially without a kitchen for months, and you can't know how painful that is until you've been without one for even a week or so, it's horrible). 4) As mentioned above, make sure you can have someone home at all times. There are always little things that come up (do you want the cab handle at the top or the bottom, do you want the faucet this way or that, light here or there a few inches, etc.) We had the flexibility to work from home when needed (main contractors, tiler, and cabinet and counter installers), but other work we had done evenings and weekend (electrician, gas fitter, etc.). 5) Check for any issues regularly, and before you let the trade go for the day. Keep detailed lists of what you want, and check each item at end of each day and before you let the trade go. E.g., if the item is "prep faucet installed", you check that it's installed the way you want it, facing the right way, the spray hose pulls out properly, it doesn't leak, etc., before you cross it off your list ... but if there are any issues you can either get it fixed right away before paying, if it's at the end of a job, or put it on your list for next day to have fixed if that same trade is back). So bottom line, if you can be there during the job and more importantly if you are organized enough to plan, plan, and plan some more, you can get a fabulous job done and save a boatload in the process. Don't be scared of doing it yourself if you have the time to plan and prepare. Good luck to you!

I am running an AMD 5 core processor and not had any issues with it, Its really a 4 core chip with a video processor included. I prefer the Intel processors, but my new Acer Desktop came with the AMD chip. I suppose that cost was the reason. I hung on to XP sp3 as long as i could and then changed to Win 7 Professional in the new computer. There was a learning curve, but Win 7 has proven to be a good operating system. The main issue, in crossing the boundary from the X86 architecture to the upgraded system, was that I lost the use of several old favorite programs. One of these was a sketching/drafting program. Since I have retired, I can not justify the cost of updating the old programs. I kept my old computer to run those.