I grew up in a small town in Texas & started school in 1958; my school was an old red brick building, & we first-graders got the "new" annex, a special building with 3 classrooms & our own bathrooms, built to accomodate the flood of boomers. (We got "new" books when the more affluent schools got brand-new books & we got their old ones!) I went to school with kids from the state home, a vast institution where children were housed when their families couldn't take care of them (such as when mom's boyfriend assaulted the kiddies, dad was in prison for bank robbery, etc). Some of the kids were there because their families simply couldn't feed all those hungry mouths. Our school was the one where the "Spanish" kids went, "Spanish" being considered the polite description in 1958, & we never had a black schoolmate until we were in the 7th grade, when our school district was faced with the decision to integrate or lose federal funding. The school board decided to integrate the 7th graders rather than the 1st graders for some reason (my cynical adult self thinks it might be that they felt that 7th graders' attitudes were already jelled; we were less likely to accept black children into our groups & maybe, horrors, date a black boyfriend, than kids who by 7th grade would have been in the same classrooms for 7 years). In elementary school, Spanish kids hung out with Spanish kids, state home kids hung out with state home kids, rural kids who rode the bus hung out with rural kids...etc. Junior high was different. It was 1964; change was in the air, (& we were 7th graders for heaven's sake; adolescent rebelliion loomed large), & those of us who weren't in the elite group saw ourselves, I guess, as social pioneers. We, black & white, were the first ones to do so many things; first to have classmates of the "other kind" first to hang out in the lunchroom & compare notes & be kids together first to (heatherns that we were) have gym together & spy in the showers to see how those very "other" girls looked; We were the first to see each other, in that little town, as individuals & not stereotypes. Example: The "main" high school was heavy into college prep, since it was the "white" one, attended by affluent college-bound kids as well as every other white kid in town, & the other high school, the "black" one, was heavy into teaching hairdressing & other trades. If you were a white kid & you weren't academically inclined & you wanted to learn a trade, you were out of luck. If you were an academically inclined black kid & you wanted to be an accountant or a lawyer, you were out of luck. (I threw a fit one summer & told my mother I wanted to go to Jackson High so I could learn to fix hair. She forbade it. To this day I don't know how to fix hair.) Until the mid-sixties, there were separate fountains in the courthouse & in some but not all of the stores. The main divisive factors, I think, were schools & housing-in the past, family & societal conditioning would have been main factors, but with Civil Rights being a hot issue & us being boomers & all...) Until my generation, black kids went to school on the East Side, white kids on the West Side, & black folks lived on the East Side, white folks on the West Side. People didn't interact with each other, didn't *know* each other. When people rub shoulders every day, they see each other as peers & treat each other as peers.

How old is the hard drive ? Thats a Smart drive monitor thingie that may indicate you need to upgrade the motherboard driver files, or upgrade bios, or replace bios battery, or you could be fixing to have hard drive failure. Or its just fragged so bad its having difficulties. Defrag lately ? Or a simple drive error check and repair may fix it, or that may also destroy it instantly. I had that happen once many moon ago. Once I ran error checking it continued blocking sectors until I ran out of space. Sorry - Sounds like your hard drive is having difficulties for some reason.

Which version of works is it? Looks like a later version, 4 maybe? One of my machines has version 2.0a, which sometimes runs into his issue with larger files. I can often get around it by one of the following: -making a minor mod and using Save As, then naming it something else and printing that. -examining the file location folder for temporary Works files and deleting them.

yes the order is important, you want to start up in this order power up the modem let it get fully lit, power up the router let it get fully lit, then power up the main pc fully then any other computers. and the rule of thumb is to wait about 5 mins downtime, from what I understand that gives time for your ISP to refresh your IP. Anytime my power goes out I also make sure when it comes back to power up in that order also. glad you were able to get things going right again.