There is certainly a differential by type, if that's what you mean. Dunno the differentials by brands of the same type.

I keep three sets of NiMHs for my camera and recharge them once a month, whether I've used them or not. They've held up well for three years now.

My Sony laptop (four years old now) came with a lithium-ion battery, and I bought a second battery to go with it (it swapped out with the floppy drive). They got deep discharged a couple times in the first year, but mostly I ran off a power brick and the batteries stayed topped up. After the first year the add-on battery stopped taking a charge, and the original battery is down to about half its original capacity—it's only good for 30 minutes of word processing or genealogy apps., or 20 minutes of DVD at last test. The batteries cost too much to shell out for more, and they stopped making them two years ago, anyway, so I am tethered to the power brick.

My point is, I've had a good experience with the NiMH rechargeable AAs for my camera, and a bad experience with rechargeable Li-ion in another format, so I haven't yet been tempted to try Li-ion rechargeable AAs (they come bundled in pairs and are called CR-V3s), even though their capacity and endurance is reported to be much better.

Traveling internationally, though, you can't always depend on being able to recharge them

Precisely my thought.

Of course, I was all excited about my new camera, and going to do things with it tonight, but then I had a meeting, and then I had to watch the LWord finale, and book rooms for where I'm goign to stay, and and...crap, it's after midnight. Dang it!

Alas. My new computer is, again, nonfunctional. I ran System Restore in the hoopes that if the shutting-off-spontanouesly thing was a virus, it would fix it. (The power supply seems sound, and it doesn't seem to be overheating.) It shut off halfway through System Restore the first time, but the second time it got through it. But now, it won't boot. I get an error message saying that the system wasn't completely installed and I need to run set-up again.

Does that mean to run System Restore again? Because if it's anything else, I don't know how to access it. Blast this thing.

It could be anything, Zenkitty. Last time I had that problem, it was a motherboard gone bad.

Oh god, Jon. Please no. I just went through that.

Like Jon said, it could be anything. I had some problems recently (system locking up or shutting off unexpectedly) that seem to be fixed after I replaced an IDE ribbon cable.

Huh. How weird--I figured out the YouSendIt/Safari issue, sort of--apparently, while it's downloading, it shows up as a quicktime thing, and you can hit play and listen to it, whatever, and if it hangs, you're screwed, but once it's DONE, you can go to the main Safari menu, hit File/Save As, and it'll save as an mp3 or whatever. Weird, dude. (Previously I'd been trying to save a big big file, so never got to the end to try that).

Other question:

So, now that I have a digital camera, I can start taking pictures and putting them on my computer. If I am not willing to spend money for fancy photo software, would y'all recommend I

a) use iPhoto b) use the software that came with the camera c) use something else (please 'splain)

There's something I don't like about iPhoto for fiddling with pictures--I feel like I only have half the options I used to have on my old crappy software-that-came-with-my-scanner. But I may just not be used to it enough.

For me, I use iPhoto for getting the pics off the digital cameras and then edit them with photoshop, if necessary.

There are at least three different cameras that I take pictures with so it's easiest to stick with iPhoto since it makes downloading part easy, no matter what camera I'm using. But, yes, I'm not crazy about the program when it comes to editing pictures.

Yes, well, having Photoshop would involve spending money, and that's something I'm SOOOO not needing to do more of right now. (And if I were to spend more computer money, it would be for more RAM. Or at least, it should be.)

I just set up the wireless network here and I'm getting ready to put Tivo on it. Does anyone use Tivo online and/or on a wireless network? What do you think about it?