Well not to beat a dead horse but I am a little slap happy from being up so late so oh well. Macs are not that expensive, get a Mac Mini for $400 bucks, and as far as what macs are used for you got to get passed the ipod and Imac. The current G5 runs on two 2.5GHz dual core processors running on a architecture designed to run bus loads of data and store it on 16 Gigabytes of DDRAM. Why have two processors so while your encoding video you can multitask and download and process 20MB RAW image files while typing a reply on a forum. Macs aint just for kids. I'd hate to disagree with you on Microsofts Legacy software, their whole problem is their software. Ever wonder why all your applications you run on Windows look different, why Explorer looks different then your dial up connection app, or why Windows Media Player looks nothing like Windows Movie Maker; or why Outlook does not resemble Word, Similar apps, but way different code running each. Reason why is that Microsoft has hundreds of departments writing code for apps that don't work together. As a result you get a bloated operating system named Window XP that has to manage all of these apps that have conflicting code and stich it together so you have a working computer. It really is a big mess when you look at XP in the old DOS. !!!DOS!!! I can't believe anything still drags DOS around. Why do you think Windows based computers need to have liquid cooling systems in them today; they need to cool the CPU that has to run Windows. !!!Liquid Cooling!!! Last time I checked liquid and electronics are a bad mix. Here is an interesting quote: Microsoft chairman told "It's not going to work" By Andy McCue Published: Monday 26 September 2005 Microsoft was forced to scrap the first incarnation of Longhorn  now called Windows Vista  after a senior executive warned chairman Bill Gates that it was too complex to work properly. Jim Allchin, group VP in charge of Windows, told the Wall Street Journal he dropped the bombshell last summer, simply telling Gates "It's not going to work". Longhorn was so complex that Microsoft's developers would never be able to make it run properly, Allchin told Gates. The root of the problem was Microsoft's historical approach to developing software  the so-called 'spaghetti code culture'  where the company's thousands of programmers would each develop their own piece of code and it would then all be stitched together at the end. According to the WSJ interview, Allchin faced opposition to his call for a completely new approach to how Microsoft develops Windows  firstly from Gates himself and then the company's engineers. The new approach was to develop a clean solid core code base for Windows which new features could more easily be added to over time and Allchin introduced new tools that would automatically reject buggy code." end quote Well maybe next summer you might get something to replace Windows XP and yes it is sloppy code and yes hackers find flaws in that code to take advantage of weaknesses in Windows based computer systems. As for Vista, or Longhorn, or whatever it's called it's a long way off, they had to start from scratch, thats how bad the operating system your using now is. Microsoft should have started from scratch a long time ago. To everyone I know this is a gardening site, not a tech site, so I apologize for the rant and I will not speak of this matter again. I think I'll follow up on some bamboo threads.

zep et. al.: Sorry I didn't get back sooner but with my limited experience, I was a little leary of doing the uninstall of network adapter. However I finally realized that at worst it would only mess up the laptop and not the other devices that are connected and working on the secured network. So: I just uninstalled and rebooted. The adapter did reinstall but I am still not getting a proper connection although things have slightly changed. The secured network got connected, but did not even ask for the security password and simply went to 'validating identity' and simply hung. It didn't even time out. I checked firefox to see if it was expecting a password there, as was the initial case to get connected to the Guest Network (where I am again now), but it couldn't find the server. You may recall, that previously the issue was that the secured net would ask for the password, but find it unacceptable and give 'limited or no connectivity. Is there a way to force the network to ask for the password?? Any other ideas? Eventually, I will probably find a way to get a knowledgeable person out to my house where they could diagnose this. FYI, I am creating another post about security updates that may tangentially be connected to this thread. I apparently successfully installed sp3 but 'security update' keeps wanting to install it AGAIN! I was worried I might not be able to shut down to reload the adapter, but I was able to cancel the update.

I think "The Women (and Men) of the Kitchen Table" would be a good show. It would certainly be informative, since there is someone here who can answer any question in the world. And it would certainly be creative and funny--remember the chats we used to have and the antics of Dottie and Marlen.

Well, I was looking for something to read the other day and, while digging through a dusty pile of books in the living room, I found a book I picked up years ago but never got around to reading. I settled in for a comfy and relaxing read. I didn't get it. What I DID get was quite a fascinating read as two of my favorite fictional worlds collided : H.P. Lovecraft's weird, eerie, creepy and just plain unsettling world of the Cthulhu mythos and Doyle's prim, proper, and ultimately logical and rational world of Sherlock Holmes. The book's entitled Shadows Over Baker Street and is a collection of short stories by well-known sci-fi writers. All the stories involve both Holmes (or his world) and Lovecraft's world. All in all, it was a cracking good read -- Neil Gaiman's story (the first one in the collection) was possibly the best and, to me, quite startling. The others in the collection are, if not equally good, at least worth a read. So, if you're either a Holmes fan (maybe a "Baker Street Irregular"?) or a Lovecraft minion (would that be a sub-demon?) then I'd recommend this book.