Any computer can be considered unworthy by someone, because a lot of it is nebulous and personal taste. For example, for my previous computer purchase, I bought a cheapie laptop because I had all the bells and whistles I needed at work so the last thing I wanted to do at home was use a computer. So I just bought something for e-mail and online shopping at home. THEN, I lost my job. Now I work from home a ton, and my DVD player that was attached to my TV went out and I can't afford a new one so I am using my laptop for watching movies, which I also do a ton more since I replaced expensive cable that I didn't care much for with Netflix. I use this as an example because even though you maybe bought a little more than you think you need, you never know where your life will take your or where technology will take us in the future. I know I paid 100 dollars more for getting a new Sony laptop, with the sole reason being I didn't have to struggle with the keyboard the way I did with all the other ones I tried, and I know I will be typing a ton in graduate school. So I have some remores at paying 100 more for a computer that is not that much better than the cheaper ones, but I KNOW I will be thanking myself later when I am knee deep in my doctoral disseration and am spending hours on it. It's very hard to know how to parcel out financial priorities in these difficult times, and THAT I DO think is worth discussing on a forum. I say, if you CAN, pay a little more to get a little more which will stand you in good stead for the future. But other people will say, get the minimum and live with it. Neither school is right or wrong. But once you have decided, own your decision and don't look back, IMHO. Because you are just going to get conflicting advice from the two camps til the cows come home. If you made what YOU thought was a good decision, stand by it. . . . Of course that is just my opinion, lol!

I agree right now if you can keep your old pc working for you and wait till windows 7 comes out you will be avoiding having to purchase any upgrades. It will be out in about a year. If you have any friends that have pc knowledge likely they could easily help you install a new hard drive and some RAM, these are things I do myself but my first time I was pretty anxious. I also agree that the desktop is generally the best option unless you travel a lot and would need a laptop for that. My sister just asked me the same question and I talked her into a desktop pretty quickly, if you have not used a laptop try asking a friend with one to let you try it out for an hour or so, feel how the keyboard feels, see how you like the touch pad instead of a mouse, etc. If you have any problems seeing also consider the smaller screen of a laptop. I have pretty severe hand problems so using a smaller keyboard would be very difficult. Sitting in a chair with the laptop on your lap would require some type of laptop desk so you do not block the air flow. As stated updating and replacing parts in a laptop is much more difficult. One thing you could definitely do also rather than install a new hard drive in your pc is buy a stand alone usb backup hard drive and move all your thousands of pictures and music and other files and data to that hard drive and free up your hard drive in the pc, if you did that and got rid of any old programs you no longer need, clean out any junk files and folders, empty the recycle bin, defrag the hard drive you may find you have plenty of room on that 80Gig hard drive. I have been seeing some incredible prices lately on usb hard drives so you could easily find a nice size one for around $50, and you could use that stand alone hard drive with any new computer you buy in the future. Plus no one would have to install it for you, you just plug it into your usb port and then you can access it from your pc just like your other hard drive. Add some RAM to what ever belarc says is your limit for that pc or at least 2 gig and I bet you would be surprised. RAM is cheap. I just bought a 1gig stick for one of my computers and it was less than $20 shipped. If your current pc is a desktop I would also highly suggest turning it off unplug it and open the side panel up and clean out all the dust bunnies, that can really affect the performance of a pc. Cleaning the computer and its components ecost has some very good prices right now this search is for under $50 units but it gives you some ideas. well now you have lots of options and ways to go and up to you to make that big decision. Here is a link that might be useful: usb hard drives

Owbitz, I don't have a System category on my control panel. There's one for sound, but nothing for device mgr. RavenCajun, Secunia showed that I might have a problem loading Java Applet, but, found no other problems. Question about checking my plug in the back? I haven't a clue where it is located or where it should be. cat, it's good to "see" you, girl! On the digital life site, I ran regedit on the Run command. Under Drivers 32, I found wavemapper to be "regular size" whatever that means! Have no idea how to acquire this driver. I couldn't find it anywhere in my Windows file. Tks to everyone for your advice. Any other ideas would be greatly appreciated.

g'day annie, osunds like a mouse related problem as you said this mouse does the same thing on another computer. yes could be that the mouse needs a clean if it is an optical mouse they can get a bit finacky the best help i got was to buy a mouse pad the one with the shark skin type appearance and with no patterns on it just plain colour that fixed a lot of my problems and cleaning fixed it a bit more. i also find my mouse wants to do odd things if i end up with malware onboard so i run my anti-spyware often. the other program i use, and i have win98, is (regclean) not sure if xp has similar program but there is bound to be one out ther somewhere, do a google for free download for a registry cleaner for xp. also could help to reinstall the mouse drivers or check to see if there are any conflicts concerning the mouse, don't know if you access the usenet (news groups)? but this is a good question for the (aus.computers) crowd they usually provide good help. also are you up to date with your (critical updates) from m$? also so maybe reload xp to refresh it might be the go? do your housekeeping as well i find all this sort of stuff helps keep things running fairly well. keep us updated we all learn from these problems, but for me my next box will be run by other than m$ o/s's i reckon just about had enough of the unreliability and shakyness of their stuff. len