"self pollinate"? The flowers just fold up after a day or so and are useless for display. In my conditions the sheath on Cattleya aurantiaca will go brown and looks dried up. This happens on some of the other spring flowering Cattleyas. Sometimes having a peek will result in damage to forming buds.

OH man NO is right definitely never try to get rid of windows xp sp2!!! Carol please any time you are thinking of getting any type of program come to one of these forums or any good computer forum and ask first!! There are many many bad programs out there that are just hoping someone will come along and give them money for programs that do nothing or even worse they try to sell you a program just so they can then have your credit card info. I would not have advised you to get the one you got either it is linked to a lot of bad websites, I doubt you will get any assistance from them either. we can give you links to very good programs that are free that will do a good job. The one I gave you for the superantispyware is a very good program that is super easy to use and it is free I would advise you to download that one and use it, I even gave you a link to a step by step tutorial you can print out so you can follow it along as you install and use it. AND absolutely NEVER ever buy or pay money for anything that just pops up on your screen when you are on the internet those are all BAD!! Just how did you come to find the delux shield that you did buy???

it could be a heat problem you did not mention if this is a desktop or laptop, if it is a desktop I would recommend turning it off disconnect all power from it, open the side of the case and look inside, if it has not been opened and cleaned in a long time my guess is it is full of dust bunnies, those dustbunnies can hold in the heat and heat will cause the pc to do what you are describing. To clean it out be sure you ground yourself by touching a metal portion of the back with one hand, you do not want to have any static charge happen that can damage things. You can use canned air to blow out a lot of the dust, do not use a big vacuum you can actually pull connections loose, I have a very small vac that I use on mine. to keep the fans from turning while you blow it out stick a pencil in to hold them in place. especially clean around the power supply area and all the fans. Here are a few links that might help understand how to do this. YOU can do this! It could also be a powersupply going out, the heat issues will exacerbate that. Replacing a power supply is a very easy task and should not cost that much to have done if you do not want to do it your self. I would recommend going with one or two steps larger than the one that was in it. The one thing I would like you to do, but I do not know what version of windows you have so I can not give your specific directions, is to go to the event viewer and look for red flags. In control panel look for administrative tools, there look for event viewer, select that, there will be various options go through each one open them and look for any red or yellow flags especially red ones, any red ones you see double click right on that line and it will provide an info box with codes and errors messages write those down and post back with them. Look here go down to where it says instructions so you can see what the event viewer will look like How To Use the Event Viewer Applet How To Thoroughly Clean Your Dirty Desktop Computer How to clean the dust out of your computer Cleaning the Interior of your PC Clean a Dusty PC Let me know how things go after doing these things. And please give me some info on this pc, windows version, laptop or pc, a good way to find out everything you need to know is to run this free program it will give you all the info including how much RAM and how much hard drive space is left. Belarc Advisor - Free Personal PC Audit you will probably need some of that info should you need to replace parts so go ahead and make a copy of the results

I correctly identified this plant as Peperomia caperata "rosso". I happily was able to purchase a beautiful specimen of it today at a local nursery.