Some computers come with a free 30 version of ms office, but I deleted mine rather then pay for it, because if I was going to buy it, I would have gotten a disc in my hand instead of "downloaded version" because I am parnoid that I will lose the number and get it deleted, and not be able to install it. But, I would not make any changes without back up disc of the OS. Is it HP? You can order them from HP if it is less then two years old. I used to have a sony lap top and it came with microsoft money, and games that took like all the memory, so I kept deleting them, but that would make the whole system not work. Things could be different now. I have deleted microsoft office and no problems yet, but I have the back up disc in case. I bought microsoft office, because it was a cheap as microsoft word alone, but it did not work for me. I returned it for a full refund and bought just microsoft word which was all I needed. I don't know if any of this information will help you, but it always better to have recovery discs before doing anything. If you don't have them, you can returnd the computer to somewhere like best buy, and have them reinstall it. But, I have heard horror stories. Even if you pay to have someone else restore it to factory specs, it may or may not work the same.

sue36, you are looking at hours:minutes:seconds there, so the other bid was entered six seconds before the end, not 6/100ths of a second. When you are outbid and the winning bidder wins by a small amount, this is almost always one bid increment. He may have put in a bid that was much higher but he only has to win by one bid increment, so that's all that he has to pay. Ebay's bid proxy system works really well this way. Once in awhile someone will win by less than one bid increment but I think this is only when his bid was entered before yours. Maybe. It's happened to me on both ends many times in nine years of ebay buying and selling. Someday I'll look at this more closely and figure out the details! Ha. When you put in an amount, always add some change to foil those who bid in even dollar amounts. For example, if you are willing to pay $25.00 for something, make your bid amount something like $26.88. You'll beat anyone who is also thinking $25 is a good price, and you'll beat those who think that going a few cents more (like $25.01 or $25.50) is a smart tactic. Sometimes I go one odd-number notch up and then another just to be safe, and more than a few times this has been necessary to win! And usually if you're willing to pay $25, then another dollar plus change is not a big deal. Oh, and I've been using Auctionstealer for many years and am quite happy with it. I used the free snipes for a long time and then started paying by the year for their service. I think only once they failed to bid for me and I have not had any problems with security at all.

Another thing: If you are having difficulties in determining what your maximum bid should be, do some research. If you go to the "advanced search" feature, you can search for completed auctions. So, if you want to buy a purple widget with a crimper attachment, you can see what the winning bids have been on recent sales of purple widgets with crimper attachments. You can also check the price of a new widget. You can check to see if it is easy to buy a crimper attachment separately. If it is, then you can also bid on purple widgets without the crimper attachment. As an example, I saw a lovely glass vitrine, or tabletop display case on Ebay. It had two shelves, beveled amber glass, gilt metal, a metal flower on top, and a pyramid shape. It was petite and gorgeous and the perfect thing for my living room and I had no idea what it was worth. And therefore no idea how much to bid. Several different searches on Ebay showed me that nothing else like this was for sale on Ebay currently, and nothing had been for sale recently. I checked on-line for new or old vitrines. Most were large pieces of furniture, which I didn't want and don't have room for. The two new tabletop vitrines I could find were not nearly as nice and didn't have the same look as the one on Ebay and cost between $200 and $300. All of this added up to the fact that if I really wanted that vitrine, I was going to have to be prepared to bid high, as alternatives really didn't exist. I bid right at the final minute (I'm too much of a coward to snipe with mere seconds left in the auction) for $175, the highest I have ever bid by a long shot. I won the vitrine for $161 and some change. It was all strategy. I knew I couldn't easily find a replacement and I had a rough idea of what the vitrine was worth. There had been several other bids over the last 48 hours of the auction, so I knew other people were interested in it. And I really, really, really wanted that vitrine and no other. I have to admit, I kept wondering if I was bidding too high, if the vitrine was worth the money, etc. But when it arrived and I unpacked it and put it on my coffee table, I knew it was perfect for the room and the look I would like to achieve. And therefore worth every penny. (Even though I probably shouldn't start the decorating plan with an accessory.) It's got the look and feel of what I would like the whole room to look like, so I can balance other choices with the vitrine. (Now I just have to decide what to put in it.) Another time, I really liked a small chrome lamp with a glass shade. Well, someone else liked it more and outbid me. Less than a week later, there was a listing for the same, exact style of lamp, but with a glass shade that did not match the lamp in style. Think ruffled cranberry glass shade on sleek, Art Deco style lamp. I won that auction for less than half of the earlier one. Even though I had to buy a new shade, I ended up spending less on it in total. I think buyers were turned off by the inappropriate lamp shade and didn't bid. I've lost plenty of other auctions because I simply didn't place as high a value on the item as other bidders. There's a type of china I like. I'm aware that when I bid on this china, I might be up against a serious collector, who will probably be willing to spend a lot more money than I am. But the china is something that would be nice to have, but not something that I really need or want, so I am willing to lose out on the auctions. So, figure out how much you really want/need the item. Check to see if other, similar items are available new or used, on Ebay or off. Check how much similar items have gone for in the past. Then figure out how much you are willing to bid. Bid once, bid your highest bid and bid as late as you can in the auction. Then sit back and relax.

Lazypup has the right idea for long term storage - use hard drives. Do not depend on camera memory cards and thumb drives for permanent storage. These eventually go bad with age. Do not trust any that are more than 5 years old. The end life may be 10 years. These cards and drives contain a 'keep-alive battery' and when the battery dies, so does the card. If you have cards that are more than 5 years old, its a good idea to replace these. A solid state memory junction is good for about 10,000 writes and rewrites. That is what kept this technology our of 'hard drives' for so long. Improvements and techniques have come along such that computer makers are beginning to place solid state drives (SSD) into lap tops. However, these are not perfect. A gamer might reach the life limit of a SSD due to his thousands of rewites to the disk. The average used probably will not reach this limit before the computer conks out or a replacement is bought. I had a bunch of photos stored on CDs, but I was warned by a genealoguy instructor to switch because the technology is changing and CDs will go the way of tape and floppy disks - these will be obsoleted in favor of DVDs. In the not too distant future, manufacurers will stop making CD drives and disks. Personally, I prefered CDs over DVDs for photo storage due to the larger spot size and separation compared to a DVD. But this won't matter in the future if no drives exist to read the CDs. As far as I can see, storage of digital photos and genealoggy files are a huge problem for me. Right now, I hobble along by moving these files to a external hard drive and that drive runs only when making backups. The rest of the time, it is off. (A purist would rightly claim this is not safe; Its much better to have a second backup copy on a another drive.) This leads to setting up a RAID array to improve relaibility. I have not done so since I am not well schooled about the features and behavor of RAID arrays. That is something I should learn.