Both of my computers are now unable to boot. Last week, the machine that is more or less my mother's computer began stopping during/right after the POST and would not respond. Friday night, my computer had a black screen, the power and HDD activity lights were on solid, and nothing could bring it back up. I did a hard restart by powering down, and it went back to the same state. I opened the box and removed everything except the RAM and the video card, still nothing. I jiggled wires and re-seated connectors, and finally the machine booted. I started adding components back one at a time until the box was again loaded, and all seemed well. I figured I had a loose connection, even though I never noticed anything during my probing, that I fixed without realizing it. Saturday morning, the black screen was back and now nothing I do, including the complete strip and check, brings it back. It seems awfully coincidental to me that this sort of thing should happen to both of my machines at the same time. But I am behind a hardware firewall in the form of a NetGear router, and both machines had ZoneAlarm,PC-Cillin anti-virus, and Pest Patrol anti-trojan sofwtare installed and operating. I am totally dead in the water, and have no clue what could have caused these problems or how to correct them. If the machine will boot, I can usually figure out a fix to whatever the problem is. If I can't even boot to DOS using a floppy, I'm out of my depth. Please, any and all suggestions appreciated. I can pick up mail from work for awhile, but I can't spend a lot of time responding. Thanks, Ron For a web-based membership management utility and information on list policies, please see http://nibec.com/24hoursupport/ To unsubscribe, send a blank email to 24hoursupport-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe" (without quotes) in the subject.