I offer you this unscientific anecdote: Yesterday, I rebooted an older Xeon box with 42 days' uptime to apply updates, but it decided it didn't want to come back up afterward: no POST, subsequent poweroff. I troubleshot briefly, and determined that after working perfectly for over a month at a stretch (and 4 years before that), it now refuses to POST unless you have half - any half - of the RAM in the first two slots. No obvious signs of magic smoke leakage. Coincidence? I suppose it's possible. I kinda wish I'd just kept the old kernel, in any event. But with the price of energy in the Netherlands, I wouldn't leave a system like that powered on for any length of time if my employer weren't footing the bill for it! Is there anybody here who keeps classic big(-ish) iron running 24x7? I've been told a story of a burning PDP-11/34 which has somewhat put me off any notion of leaving my -8s turned on when I'm not within reach of a killswitch & fire extinguisher. :) -js