Ellie if you only have anti virus you are at risk. I would suggest you get Malwarebytes and SUPERantispyware, both of which are free. These require you to manually update and run scans but they only need doing every one to 3 weeks depending on how conscientious/nervous you are. I never leave my external hard drive connected to the computer. This is both for safety and economy. Connected it is open to attack and also runs all the time. If you have a factory built computer your power supply might be taxed to a degree unless your external drive is self powered. Most today are not self powered I believe. You wrote: If I can't bring my computer up ( that is called a crash or a blue screen) I install my recovery discs first. The CD drive works even if the computer has crashed. There is no real answer to this untill the catastrophic event occurs. You might get clues for days before the event to warn you. There would also be valuable clues in the event of a blue screen of death from the error message displayed. (BSOD) I assume you mean Best Buy replaced a defective hard drive with a new one? What was written on the labels of the disks from BB? That would be a clue as to what they are for. As I noted before recovery disks allow you to take your computer back to the new state it was in when purchased, a backup created on your external drive will return the computer to the state at the time of that backup. Any work saved in between would be lost. You can store your data on the computer itself and back it up to the external drive for protection. Always a good plan to have data you do not wish to lose saved in 2 locations Outlook is generally a part of Microsoft Office although I understand it can be bought as a stand alone program - quite expensive too. One would presume Cobian Backup came with your Go_Flex drive. It is good that you ask these questions but be sure to allow yourself to enjoy the benefit these things can bring you. A computer is only as good as the person sat in front of the keyboard. Urlee and Cat_ky I have no issues with anyone owning more than one computer, I have 6 and all working yet I live alone. But to purchase another computer "just in case" seems rather more than odd to me and a complete waste of money for an item that keeps becoming out of date with alarming regularity. Don expressed it very wisely I think.

Ummmm...this post is from Dec. 1st & today is Dec. 12th ...& am still decorating! Well, I miss a day now & then to go shopping or do a little volunteer work ...I think it's about time to put the 'totes away' & call it good! Time to wrap pkgs & work on some Christmas gifts...LOL! Anyway, for Jane...this is one of those 'remote control' candles WORKING again this yr! I thought you would be pleased to know that ...cause you use them so beautifully on your mantle. I need a couple more hurricanes for the other 2 sizes ...but here's a pic of my Winter Platzgraff wine glasses & goblets (both thrift shop finds!) Jeanne

I was probably 14 or so before I actually "decorated" anything, other than covering every inch of some really horrible 1950s yellow-and-white-stripes-with-tiny-shiny-gold-flowers wallpaper with posters and pages torn from the pop-star magazines. My parents didn't really believe in wasting money on frivolous things like decorating so if I wanted anything I had to pay for it myself and work with the things I already had as-is. They were very much into "use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without" and decorating was one of the things they could really do without. (Well, my mother did decorate more - especially during her "country clutter" phase - and was the yard-sale queen but I didn't live with her because I didn't get along with my stepfather.) I had a tiny bedroom, less than 10x10, and the closet was a door across one corner of the room with a few hooks inside (which I think my folks secretly liked because it meant less shopping for clothes!). Anyway, when I was 14 I broke the bed that came with my horrible Sears French Provincial set and for a couple of years I had the mattress and box spring on the floor. :-) I put an old bookshelf at the top as a headboard, where I put my cassette player and cassettes and a reading lamp. I had a navy and white quilt made of bandanas my aunt made, just a bunch of bandanas sewn together with a backing, so I was kind of stuck with a blue-based color scheme. The (rented) house came with white aluminum blinds and once I got rid of those horrible Priscilla curtains (very much a fad about 10 years before and they just kept following me around) I just slid the curtain rod through the top hems of white twin-size sheets and covered that awful fussy white dresser with another sheet. I talked the landlord into letting me paint the walls as long as I paid for the paint and I think he was envisioning a nice girly-pink or beige... I painted the walls midnight blue and sponged them with half a dozen different shades of blue I made by mixing the blue with white paint. I did it in one long day when my parents weren't home. I liked it, it was like being in a snowstorm at night, but my dad was about ready to throttle me. (It took three coats of primer and two coats of paint to cover it up.) I cut back my posters to a dozen or so ;-) and framed them with those horrid snap-together black plastic frames from KMart, but that looked better than just scotch-taping them to the walls! When I was 16 my parents gave me a double bed for my birthday (with the intent that I take it with me when I moved out on my own) and I went through this weird little '80s-modernist/Deco phase. I bought a carpet remnant in a medium gray and repainted the walls dove gray. Found a set of Marimekko sheets in a clearance bin - white with geometric patterns in black, red, and electric blue - and ran with those colors. I still had that dang bandana quilt (and it stayed around until long after I'd graduated from college and I was SO sick of it... that whole "wear it out" thing really stuck) but I covered it with a red blanket. I got rid of that icky dresser and put all my clothes in stacked red milk crates. My then-boyfriend gave me a gigantic Patrick Nagel print (80s, remember? LOL) and I replaced the brass swing-arm lamp I had during the "blue period" ;-) with a red and black modernish one. Spray-painted a few things I had (got in deep trouble for that) shiny black. My parents moved to another very tiny house when I went to college the next year; my bed and a few small things went into the spare bedroom at the new house to act as a guest room but pretty much everything decorative ended up at Goodwill because my folks hated just about all of it. :-/

Wow, nice space. I can see why you want advice. Open spaces are difficult to envision. Is it open to dining and kitchen as well? Can you do pic from front door and to the left side of room. I can't tell where tv is going, please point it out. Having said all of that, the view from windows looks great, so I would focus on that, minimizing window coverings. Looking forward to see what you do.