Okay. You guys are great. Clearly the collective wisdom is not to throw money at the problem - but figure the problem out. Owbist - in my thread on not connecting my husband's vista laptop to our network, I tried quietly, methodically to troubleshoot the issues - to no avail. I found lots of similar frustrations on google - but no solutions that worked - and I think I tried them all - at least to the best of my ability. thanks for those great, easy-to-follow instructions to transfer to an external hard drive. He'll want to do that anyway - even if he keeps this computer. This computer guy is pricey - but where I am in DC they seem to fall in the $125-140/hour range - and they can usually fix a problem. Others that charge $40-75 - that the uninformed think are good - but their know-how is less than what I find here. I tried a few of those locally recommended guys - and they accomplished the simple tasks but also made mistakes I had to hire the more expensive guy to fix. My main complaint with him is that he's wedded to his biases - he hates Vista - so his recommendation is usually to avoid or ditch it. Our struggles with Vista seem to often be how often we're blocked from things or performing simple tasks have all sort of obstacles - for "safety's" sake. Thanks to everyone for pointing out that Windows 7 is just a revamped Vista. I got my first issue of Smart Computing and they were tauting it and described some features I thought I'd love. DA - if W8 is in process, is there any indication of what it will be like? Probably worth waiting for - or at least waiting to hear more about how Windows 7 is panning out. So I'll keep plugging away on my other thread to get him connected. If I don't succeed by Tuesday, the computer guy will come and fix it. I guess we'll stop there. Thanks. Lynn.

mikie, when I right click it and then click Eject, I get the message there is no disk inserted. Please insert disk and try again. I just realized that you tried helping me back in August with this blasted thing! On the F removable disk properties, the General tab shows this: Name: HP USB Device I don't understand this at all, as the only HP product I own is a 3 in 1 printer. Description: shows nothing State: The drive is empty Statistics: Mount 0 Last cleaned: Unknown Deferred dismounts: shows nothing Retain dismountable media for 5 minutes Enable drive is checked. Under the Device information: Manufacturer (Standard disk drives) Model: HP USB Device Serial number: shows nothing Revision: 1.00 Device Name: \\.\Physical Drive 2 Drive letter: F Device Address Port: Bus: Target: LUN Under the Security tab: Everything is checked to allow In disk management it shows Disk 2 Removable (F) No media

Kudzu9--I didn't see your suggestion before my last post. I just tested that and it's just another way to change the volume. If I set it all the way down using the Fn-F11, then look in control panel, the volume slider is all the way to the left. I haven't tried any headphones, but they're basically just another variation of an unpowered speaker, so my expectation is that they'd be pretty much inaudible. Since she wants to use the laptop to play audio books while in several rooms, headphones wouldn't be useful to her anyway.

had you gone to windows updates and got the multitude of updates you would need after using recovery material to re install windows? If not that is probably what happened it started trying to download and install all those many updates and it locked it up. You may have even needed service pack 2 and 3 with a unit that old. plus of course all your antivirus programs etc would be trying to update also. It is always best when doing that kind of recovery where you will be very very far behind in windows updates to turn off automatic updates and go manually to windows update and first get your service packs in order and be absolutely sure to reboot the computer after each service pack, then get any remaining updates. I usually suggest getting them in small batches and creating a restore point before each service pack and before each batch of updates. Should something go wrong you have a good restore point to return to.