It's just about reading the messages, one reason why I like the fact that hal's installation Cd autoruns. I actually installed it myself on my new (though sinse exploded), desktop with no assistance whatsoever and no trouble.

One important thing is to remember the short cuts for program windows. Usually r if your trying to run something, or y for the "are you really sure"

A disturbing one that happened recently is my parents desktop got a virus. when my brother checked things it was a program which had been installed the previous day.

It turned out what happened is my dad was brousing the net and got a window appearing asking him if he wished to install some random rubbish. He clicked no, but because of the way the window was set up, there wasn't a no button and either would mean clicking yes. One advantage of keyboard short cuts, alt f4 is your friend in those sorts of situations.

And we didn't expect this from MS why? laugh.

Honestly Dark I personally quite like NVDA for setting up a computer. It is substantially better than narrator and can be made to autorun straight from the CD. It saved me a lot of trouble setting up my current desktop, for some reason Jaws' graphics intercept wouldn't work until I had installed the proper NVidia graphics drivers. I downloaded the drivers on my laptop, stuck them on a USB drive and used NVDA to run through the install... then it worked beautifully.

Well this graphics issue was a major issue, and it saved me using narrator. Normally I wouldn't even need that since the Jaws install and CD also self voices.

That's good news indeed, hopefully using the same model motherboard won't throw out your activations.

Fortunately at least here where I live, you can combine your own computer and that's your word that stands for the operating system, but as most of the people around here tend to buy premade computers, they get vista, which is a joy for the IT-technologists, who can then make a huge amount of cash out for making repairs to people's vistas.
I have also tried linux and there is the thing of multiple different systems, which can make you stuck. You just need to know, which kind of system you want. For example, when ubuntu is a fearly set up frontend, then debian leaves a lot of things up to you. For example I even had to install special drivers for my wireless card, which with ubuntu were already installed and working.

well as I said, going through a nice litle local firm, i basically got to build mine and decide what went on it. This included asking them to install a copy of power dvd, ---- my personal favourite dvd playing program. yes I know I could use windows media player, but I prefer not to. Even for music I much prefer winamp.

I think the big chain shops like Pc world over here in england are exclusively selling vista right now, but even if there isn't a vista issue, i'd always prefer a small llocal company who I trust, than a huge faceless coorporation of doom, especially for something as personal to me as my personal computer.

I bet if I'd had the motherboard failure with someone like pc world, they wouldn't have been half as keen on replacing it.

Most of the people really don't have time for court issues, therefore they leave it as it was. I remind once wanting to buy a synthesizer, but the price on the webpages was more than 2 times lower than it was really. When I got to know that, I cancelled the order and learned only 2 months later from my radio director, that the issue would have been resolved simply by demanding that they compensate the amount they missed from the price, but I then left it as it was, so that I am possibly still later able to make deals with this company if I ever should want to.
I don't actuelly know, how many companies there in UK are manufacturing their own laptop, but here it's even possible to combine your own one if you want, sinse the shop is ordering parts from outside and complecting them here.

That's my dream. To build your own pc. although I won't like it to burn up like it did in the cilicon vally pirates movie.

Hi,
CX2: have you herd of unattended Windows installs?
Basicly, you copy a file called winnt.sif into the i386 directory of the XP CD, and custimise it to your preferences.
Then, you stick the CD in the CD-rom drive, make sure the computer is set to boot from your CD drive first, and wait for the opporating system to install.
Its much easior than spending ours installing the opporating system with sited help, but may be that's just me being impationt, lol!

Ok, I was just trying to be
helpful