I'll second that. There was a time when I thought HP was a great company making great products. Although they still make some excellent high-end computers, their home and office desktops and laptops are horrible. I have never dealt with a single HP computer that worked right. Their outstanding lead in the printer business is a thing of the past. There are now many companies making printers just as good, for a hell of a lot less money. Occasionally I see Circuit City or another retailer running a contest in which the prize is a HP computer. My remark is always "Second prize is _two_ HP computers." OTOH, all of the Compaq computers that I have dealt with have been trouble free. I think their maintenance HDD partition and peripheral BIOS/peripheral management is great. About the only thing that I don't like is their extremely proprietary design. That's fine on enterprise servers. It's inexcusable on a business desktop that someone actually has to support in a small business environment. Arthur Clark At 11:45 AM 9/4/2001 -0400, you wrote: