"Shake and Bake" refers to the nickname given to the state of California, which it is not only named for, but it is the state flower for :) California is often referred to as "Shake and Bake, USA WELL DUH!...lol, FANNA WHO IS Hysterical laughing at herself for FORGETTING THIS FACT about Callie! See I am afraid to TRY any Poppy for breadseed because what if someone sends one they THINK is safe and it isn't? JASMINE, I ACCIDENTLY TYPED THE WRONG NUMBER! All is WELL it WAS Margos I was working on and since I believe I meanted the gift she gave me it was clear it was just a slip of the finger or brainwave or something along those lines..... Lisa I stayed up last night til 5:00 am or would that be stayed up this morning til? Oh well, which ever that is what I did. It is just a matter of me bring ODC and can't stop until I feel HAPPY with the results....lol!!! WOW you all are sending in some REALLY REALLY good stuff!!! Wendy, thanks for my GIFT...I will be on a CHOCOLATE high tonight, haha! That was so sweet of you to think of me, thanks again. I am actaully taking a breather at this minute to eat supper then I will get back to the seeds. :) Fran I will go ahead and post #11 thread!

New bios may be in preperation to avoid win7 problems or some know hardware limitation or problems. I usually update bios's. I don't know for sure but Dell 'should' have a simple failsafe install method for it. That realtech driver update is very popular. My 1.5 yr old toshiba - toshiba just offered a dozen or more hardware driver updates, mostly dealing in advance for Win7 updates. Which by the way the amazon's and other big software sellers are offering upgrade pre-orders till July 11th or while supply lasts ... 50% off sale... $50 home premium and $100 dollars pro versions.

Hi, Mikie. Thanks. I guess I will look for a 1.5TB drive (unless I don't find any with very good reviews - I know I've seen some 1 TB drives that get great reviews for around $100). I know I have one open sata port (I did have my computer open last week to take my Tivo original hard drive and copy it to a new 1TB hard drive - with all the snafus this 1- 1/2 hr. project took 8 hours on Saturday - and on and off all Sunday to complete). There is definitely a bay for a second hard drive. I had 2 sata ports but just added an esata cable so I'm using one of those now. I definitely don't have such huge files (maybe 10-15GB at most for a long high-def movie), so I'll look into partitioning the drive (which is an intimidating idea now, but I'll work up to it). I'm not sure what you mean by break-away covers. But this computer comes with an empty slot in front where a firewire port can be. I think this is what you mean by does the faceplate have provisions for it. I've looked through Dell forums. I'm copying the link here: http://en.community.dell.com/forums/t/18748278.aspx?c=us&l=en&cs=04&s=bsd&PageIndex=1 It's amazing that for over a year folks have been trying to add this front firewire port after the face - and most of them cannot get a straight answer from Dell. The variety of responses - including it can't be done, it can only be added to the rear, a suggestion of different needed parts - and then perhaps one answer that seems right - but they got the part number wrong and it took the woman 30 minutes to find the information out. Anyway, I've read through it several times bc. it all seems to unclear. I wish I could have read that several people did the same thing and it worked. But people had different solutions. I think I'll call Dell parts and ask about this one: Part #J4975 ($32.99): * IEEE 1394 PCI Card (all internal cables included) for Dell Inspiron 530 Desktop * One end has FireWire port that will be accessible on front of computer (i.e., via the existing slot) * The other end is the PCI Card (which connects to the motherboard) and also has three additional FireWire ports accessible on back of computer. * Internal cables (included with purchase) connect the two ends. * All four FireWire ports have 6-pin heads. But even that part number is wrong - it's supposed to be Y4975. It sounds like the right thing to me. Then I can just plug in my Lego parts. Dell support is just so uninformed. Back to the hard drive, do I need to get cables as well as the drive? I'm sure I need 1 or 2 cables to connect the drive to my computer - and I'm asking in case that answer is more clear. Thanks. Lynn. PS - I'm not mechanical - but I'm determined to learn.

A long time ago, I did a Mint Mate install(actual install, not live) onto a 16GB Gigaware USB flash drive. It booted slow as molasses and the first time running apps was just as slow. It ran fine afterward though. I considered getting a faster flash drive such as a SanDisk Extreme, but it wasn't it my budget at that time. I seem to remember playing around with bcd.exe but my memory is short. Some day I'll have to give EasyBCD a try. In the meantime, GRUB works for me. An extraordinarily boring (and embarrassing, mostly because I flubbed customizing GRUB2 because I'm too lazy to learn to use it properly right now) video of my installing Mint Mate alongside Windows 10 in a virtual machine... I suppose the point is that they can, at least sometimes, live happily beside one another. I was really expecting Mint Mate to offer to "install alongside windows" and auto-partition but it did not. Don't some other Ubuntu based distros do that? Or is it just full blown Ubuntu? Anyway, after all my stumbling, doing it incorrectly, redoing etc., Grub now reads exactly the way I want, remembers the previous boot choices etc. ... That's just a virtual machine though. I wouldn't suggest others try it on their real machines. I suppose if one were to practice setting up a dual boot system, a virtual environment would be the safe place to learn, right? BTW, I used Oracle's VirtualBox in the above videos. Free and open source. Oops, I just read the warning on the VirtualBox download page: "Please be aware that Windows 10 is not yet officially supported!" Oh well, seems to run fine for me.