Thank heaven for battery backups!!!!! I can't praise them enough!!!!! Here's the kind of life saver one of these under-$100 marvels can be. Weather is overcast, dry, no wind - not even a breeze. But, not 3 minutes ago a simultaneous *huge* bolt of lightening/clap of thunder hit something on the hill above the house - saw the flash out my window. Also *simultaneously* my computer battery backup let out one of it's "dings" and my computer went toes up dead. The power all over the house was out for, maybe, 3 seconds. And I'd just finished and saved (thank my lucky stars) a *huge* new data base on the status of all 372 files/families for the Supplement to MCAR Families. I was still connected to my ISP, though <panic>. Upon resetting the battery backup to shut up its endless beep-beep-beep-beep and rebooting, my screen tells me "you didn't shut down properly and may have damaged segments" <gulp> and was running scandisk. Not one single thing was damaged, lost, gone, dead, or whatever <BBBBG> Got talked into a battery backup around 8-10 years ago. Figured it was sort of more of those gizmos/gadgets that get added to computers whether needed/used or not. I soon learned *this* gismo/gadget was probably the most useful thing I owned (after the computer itself, of course). It's saved my ___ a jillion times over the years <whew> Why everyone in the whole world doesn't have one is beyond me. Why they're not touted in every computer ad and on every computer site is also beyond me. Just thought I'd let you all know what can - almost - happen. That little gray box on the floor just saved 2 1/2 years on a huge book along with my checking account, addresses, my own genealogy, my internet stuff - the whole works. Think about one. They're truly marvelous. Mysty shakerag@mtnhome.com