The laptop's all set up - and dd received it on Tuesday. For now we'll try open office. She does have a desktop pc with word if she needs it. And at school they use Mac's. So no matter what we use at home, it won't be quite the same as in school. abreeze - thanks for the link. It's beyond anything she or I will do now - but one or both of us might get more versed in powerpoint over time. That's a helpful comparison. I created recovery disks - but when I went to create a password reset disk, the laptop kept asking me to insert a disk. There was a disk in there. I even switched disks in case one was bad. But it was birthday day - so I figured I'd get to this later. Well - it came back and bit me in the butt. Birthday night had some trauma. After dinner, my mother fell backwards and hit her head on the sidewalk. I took her to the ER. My daughter was distraught - and the parent controls had logged her off at 9pm. Husband thought this was a reasonable exception - so he logged into the admin account for her. She immediately eliminated the time controls. No big deal, I thought - I'll reset them another time. Somehow she tricked my husband into entering the admin password again - told him she'd restarted the computer by accident. Well - that sneak had gotten him to enter the password in a field that allowed her to change it. She changed the passwords and locked us out of the laptop. So this is where that password reset disk would have been helpful - to override what she did and reset a new admin password. So this is partly a note to people about the important of creating a password reset disk (or set up on flash drive). I'd never even heard of this before. We're at the beach with my daughter and friend - it's instead of a birthday party. So we're not having the confrontation with this weekend. Monday - we tell her she has to hand back the reins for the admin account (or no laptop). The joys of parenting preteens. It took her less than 24 hours to violate most of the terms of the contract she signed. Sure wish I'd had that reset password disk. When I get admin control back, I'll be sure to create one somehow. (I assume at this point my only option is getting her to give me that new password she created.) Thanks. Lynn.

Thanks, Grandms. I couldn't reply right away because I had to go out for several hours. I go directly to the web mail via my browser, connecting to each type of e-mail separately by clicking on it in Bookmarks (=favorites). I never use Outlook E. and although I do use Hotmail, I decided not to have it gather all my e-mail in one place. I use one e-mail program for one sort of business, and other programs for friends, or i-Tunes receipts, and so on. It simplifies life somewhat. Hmm, although over the past three days or so, I had to give up on many of my attempts to bring up Lycos, this morning and again, just now, it came up with no problem. I can't help connecting the trouble with their switch to Zimbra, but on the Zimbra forum that I visited in hopes of a cure, Zimbra told someone else that it is entirely a Lycos problem and, in effect, washed their hands of it. When I was searching here for a solution, I came across a post I made in Dec. about something similar, but not as bad as it was this time. I guess if no one else is having this trouble and it doesn't start bothering me again, I might be smart to just let sleeping dogs lie!

Jane - good question. I know I can use AOL free mail. It seems to me that this summer/early fall, I kept finding issues with AOL email - and several web-savvy people (like my web designer, etc. suggested that AOL is very troublesome in it's efforts to be helpful. Now I'm having trouble remembering why I was getting so frustrated with AOL. This is what I do recall. Not always being able to view embedded images (including an email blast from a non-profit I'm on the Board of). Difficulty formatting emails - if I cut and paste word documents in the email, it gets deliverd with all kinds of extraneous punctuation and symbols. I've had neighborhood listservs reject some of my postings bc. AOL sent so much gibberish with it. I had to rewrite it to get it sent to these neighborhood yahoo-group listservs in a format that was clear. I think (I could remember this wrong), that if I use AOL's fonts, colors, formatting - it may not get delivered that way. Now I'm opening AOL mail through the firefox browser and not using AOL software. I have found that the search function is vastly inferior to the search function if I opened AOl software. Having AOL email open in Firefox, the searching for emails is highly inaccurate - to the point of being almost useless. This is probably the single biggest frustration I have with AOL (now that I"m not using their software). I don't know that it would work any better if I used the free AIM instead of opening my AOL mail in Firefox. Not quite sure if and how AIM is different. Using AOL mail via Firefox - it just handles my emails badly. It will place emails in my old folder when I've marked them as save as new. I seem to have less control over where I save my emails. It seems to almost randomly decide whether it keeps the email in the new inbox - or places it in the old folder (where it eventually disappears). And I can only access old emails for a short period before they're deleted. And the recently deleted seem available for a tiny, tiny time compared with the AOL software. Jane - if your experience with AOL mail is different, please let me know. I know that it's just been very cumbersome and un-useful since I switched to Firefox this summer. Another problem -which may not be AOL, but could be firefox - or who knows what else. If I'm looking on craigslist and I want to inquire about an item for sale, I can't manage to reply to the poster. I hit the "reply to" button, it places that poster's anonymous contact info in the to: field - but when I hit send, it says that I can't send mail with parenthesis in the BCC field. I have not added anything in the BCC field - and if I click bcc field and delete everything in it, it still insists there are parenthese in the field and won't send the email. Gee - now that I start thinking about it, I guess I can recall all the frustrations I've been having with AOL (not using the AOL software). The reason I haven't cancelled my paid AOL account is bc. I still need to resort to going through AOL software to reliably access and search old emails. I will keep a free AOL account with my current email address - just so I can be reached by anyone I forgot to inform about my new address. And for those who forget and send to the old. I still want to receive those emails. But my hope is to use it less and less often bc. it's troublesome now. A different reason for not using AOL for my professional email is that it just doesn't look professional. (I presume that's one reason your husband using gmail for his professional correspondence - it's just more professional and less amateurish seeming to clients/customers.) not2bright- I appreciate the FWIW addition. It's a little over my head - but not completely. I do have a professional website - which my webdesigner set up to forward my emails to me. I'm not quite ready for setting up my personal email like this, but the more I hang out on this forum, the more I'm willing to attempt things that I once thought were not possible. Lynn.

If she wants a desktop program, it will depend on the operating system she has. If XP, then she can use Outlook Express and configure her Yahoo, Gmail, or whatever to download into that without going to the web site. If she has Windows 7, MS has a program called Windows Live Mail which she must install on her computer. Again, her mail can be configured to download to her desktop program. And there's Thunderbird which has been mentioned.