Many local governments (city, county) in the US offer subsidized compost bins to their residents. I've seen the Biostack, Earth Machine, and at least one other model offered. Sometimes you can even get a worm box from these offers! Prices here in the Bay Area for subsidized bins run approx. 1/3 of retail price, give or take, so definitely check it out. I think the Biostack is retailing for $99 to $129, depending on where you want to purchase it, so $200 should get you some nice goodies, even if you have to pay full prices. Enjoy! Cynthia H. El Cerrito, CA

The last I heard was it takes $100 to fix a monitor no matter what is wrong. With today's lower prices on better monitors it might be wise to buy a new one and get a full warranty. You would have it ready for when you decided to buy a new tower too.

If I am doing something like .. downloading a torrent (Which I would Never, Ever do) .. and I don't have any browser windows open and shut my monitor off .. will my video card stop running? No probably not, the video card expects it's signal to reach the monitor. It has no way to understand you turned the monitor off. On my Windows 7 home build with a Gigabyte motherboard sleep mode meant everything stopped running and all open things were saved to the memory (RAM), tyhe computer was totally silent. However it has been a troublesome board from the start and I recently rebuilt using a cheaper Biostar board. Now only the hard drives and monitor goes to sleep similar to what other operating systems do in sleep mode. Most store bought computers today have the video built into the motherboard along with all the other peripheries from yesteryear. What do you hope to save, money on power or wear and tear? Just curious here.

I also have a cannon about that age and it clearly states it will not take anything over a 2 GB SD card. That would definitely be my guess as to why you get that error. I agree the point of the memory card is to use it to temporarily store the pictures on the camera till you can off load them to your pc and burn them to cd or whatever medium you choose, take the card in and have them printed out or what ever. Once you do that you have all the space on the card available again. I never use the cable to transfer pictures and never use any software from the camera it is just not needed when you can so easily use the memory card in a memory card reader.