dear Rose - you are 3 or 4 steps ahead of me [ i don't have the space to be too elaborate] but i have space enough to copy your system for the future ! i had a similar hardware problem. not to be too technical, it was a power supply insufficiency. a higher wattage p-s did the trick. cheers jo __________________________________________________________________ From: "Tech Rose - LoveBytes" <TechRose@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Subject: -=PCTechTalk=- Re: AAAhhhhh I don't believe it!!! Date: Thu, 26 May 2005 14:23:29 -0700 I am sorry about the reformat and loss of data incident. I think many of us have either experienced it..or know someone who has. The loss can be depressing... [snip] I just got my computer back from the shop after THREE WEEKS! It ended up that the 1 gb of ram (two matching 512 mb chips went bad when the 2 gb of ram (2 matching 1 MB chips were put into the machine) For some reason the machine would not even power on for over a second with the bad ram in it. I am NOT a hardware person, so I was at a loss. Now, I have my puter back with my 3 gb of ram working and I am a happy camper. I dreaded the thought of a reformat and told them if they had to do it, to call me and I would come to the shop and do it myself to make sure they did not reformat the entire hard drive. They 'said' they would .....lol! Luckily it did not happen.) Again, feedback about all this would be most helpful. Rose Las Vegas -- <Please delete this line and everything below.> To unsub or change your email settings: //www.freelists.org/webpage/pctechtalk To access our Archives: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PCTechTalk/messages/ //www.freelists.org/archives/pctechtalk/