Hello subscribers, Those of you who happen to be on more than one of my lists may see this message multiple times, for which I apologize in advance. I just wanted to let you all know that I am having major computer problems at this time. I can still get to my new mail (though not as quickly or often as before), but my access to old mail is gone until my computer is restored -- I have my mail on a zip disk right now, but I can't get to it easily. I have also temporarily lost all my bookmarks until my system gets restored. So, if any of you have questions or requests, it will probably be a while before I can address them properly. My husband is out of town right now, so I am computerless until he returns and we decide what to do. It all started with problems within Netscape last Monday. On Tuesday the problem had spread to Windows itself. After getting all my data safely backed up onto zip disks, I actually reformatted my C drive and tried to reload Windows '98. Unfortunately that didn't stop the crashes. I have seen that "blue screen of death", otherwise known as a fatal exception, at least 100 times since Monday. My family tree maker files were the first to get backed up onto the zip disks. I hope you all learn something from my situation. Hard drives *DO* fail. This makes the 2nd that has failed on me in 2 years. Both times I had to hope that I could get the system back far enough to back up my files. Last time the hard drive crashed I became serious about making backups; I backed up the file to the zip disk every week and also every time I made a major change to the file. But that zeal waned and I stopped making regular backups. I'm lucky I was able to get to my data to back it up this time. Next time I might not be so lucky. So, I will do my very best to be more conscientious about backing up my data from now on. Let my twice learned lesson also be a lesson to you. -- Mary Taffet List Administrator mdtaffet@syr.edu