Thanks everyone

Thanks for all the kind comments and understanding about this year’s hiatus. I am especially delighted to hear about the adopted black kitty. Thankfully, I recovered some time ago from my minor surgery and related woes - currently I am just fighting a run-of-the-mill winter cold. As for the computer, it is now in rude health after two weeks in intensive care in the shop. It all started when I decided to add some memory and upgraded my video card in order to speed up Vista. When I got it back from the shop, it would just randomly power off with no warning. I defy anyone to troubleshoot this problem while remaining calm and collected - I developed a phobia about going into my office to see if it was still running. When I took it back, the techies did many hours of testing and found that the motherboard was bad. They replaced it with a new one, put in a new power supply, then also discovered that my hard drive was about to die. So they replaced that as well. Luckily they are the masters of backing up and moving data, so I did not lose much. About the only original hardware left at this point is the case and some memory. I am now running XP again - I don’t know how other people find Vista, but on my setup it was way too slow and unpredictable. I am usually an enthusiastic early adopter, but I’m going to wait awhile before trying it again.