What great options. Digitizing a lifetime of music, voice recordings, movies, etc sure is time consuming. But it's wonderful there are so many options out there. Raven- I had forgotten all about Heartland catalogue. It's been probably 20 years since I ordered from them. Those are some great gadgets. The one with lp too is a bit pricey - esp. since I have a cd recorder connected to my turntable. It's a lot less convenient than having it by the computer - but it works well. The one for just tapes looks good. Grandms'- I don't need the turntable portion, but your post made me think that with the right cables (do you happen to know what they are?) I should be able to hook up my old compact stereo/cassette player to my computer. My question about that has always been that I don't think i have an input into my sound card. Does that mean I have an integrated sound card (without its own input port). But there must be cables that could transfer from a stereo to a usb port. Heck - are there cables that go to a firewire port - or perhaps that's overkill for music files. What's Pyro? Did that come with turntable - or just a program you have? I assume Roxio cd creator could do that - burn a cd? how did you find Cakewalk easier than Audacity? I think I've heard good things about both. And Urlee and Jean love Audacity and find it easy. So I'd appreciate any other thoughts in deciding which software to use? Thanks. Lynn.

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

Sounds like you've just about declared it dead :) If it is, it is, but I just wanted to try to narrow it down, and I didn't want to throw money around willy-nilly in the hopes of figuring out what the problem is. Your search took me to Ebay Canada. I took the liberty of changing the .ca to .com to get Ebay US, but with the same search. Why pay extra shipping if I don't have to? Like I said, I'm a novice at this, so I may not be entirely sure what I'm looking at, but from what I've noticed, I only clicked on the ones that had 3 memory slots (I have three sticks, so might as well use them), and from what I could tell, all the ones I looked at were listed as used, and total with shipping they still came darned close to $90. I did see this one below which ends in the morning (hopefully nobody here will sabotage me and bid against me!) and comes with a CPU which is slower than mine. I don't know the difference between a K8N-E and a K8N4-E. At least in the one I showed you earlier this morning, the MB was used, but the CPU that came with it was an UPGRADE to the one I have now. In fact, it's the fastest chip that can go in that board. The chip by itself (ATHLON 3400 CPU, 754 socket) is selling for $25US anyway on Ebay. I just thought overall, the whole repair would be cheaper, since I can replace my CPU for under $10, but if the going price of these motherboards means I'm going to wind up paying (total with shipping) $80-$90 anyway for a used board with no CPU, I just as well get the one with the 3400 in case my CPU is fried as well, correct? Thank you again, and forgive me if I'm being presumptuous. I just want to make sure I'm understanding correctly. If I'm wrong in any way, feel free to slap my wrist. Here is a link that might be useful: K8N4-E on ebay

On that phone the built in ring tones are most likely midi format. That's the only flip phone I don't have here but pretty sure that's what it is. If your new phone has a voice recorder you could just record it onto the new phone. My desktop doesn't have blutooth but I bought a rocket fish bluetooth adapter for $20 that plugs into the USB. Works perfect with my smart phone and hubbys badic phone to transfer files. I have an otterbox case on my phone so a pain to take it off all the time to get at the back cover to take the memory card out so this was an easier solution and cheap. Mary This post was edited by acraftylady on Sun, Nov 2, 14 at 14:08