My mother's laptop, which is pretty close to being her link to sanity as she sits in a hotel room in Baton Rouge, has started spontaneously shutting off. Anyone have a guess what might be happening? My first thought is overheating -- could that happen if she's just sitting at a desk, using it?

My first thought is a trojan or adware. If she has Adaware and Spybot, make sure she updates them and runs them. If she has not these things, download, update and run.

There are a couple of other good ones, but the cats are begging for food and I can't think.

I have a 1st generation, 5GB iPod. I really can't justify buying something with less capacity. Maybe they'll bump it up to 8GB in due course.

Also, iTunes V5? Uuugggleeee.

Try AVG for a good virus blocker too.

In other Things That Are Small And Therefore Cool news, here is a cell phone the size of a large pen.

I have a question for anybody who makes icons, especially people who use Photoshop Elements or use LJs icon management site. I noticed today that several of the icons I've made and a couple of icons other people have made have become just dark blurs on my work computer.

I know that these icons look fine on my home computer, and I took a quick survey about how they appear to other people. Some people just see the blurs, but to some people they are fine. I also think that some of the same icons that are just blurs now have been okay on my work computer before. I'm not sure about this part, but if it is true, the change has happened since I added the icons to LJ's management site [link]

Does anyone know why this happens, or what (if anything) I can do to make the icons work on all computers?

Anyone know how I get adobe reader not to try to "tag" documents for reading. I have told it to ask me first, and tell it not to, since I have no intention of having it read outloud. But I can't find anyplace to turn it off and tell it not to do so. Also I have adobe javscript turned off. Is there anyway to get it to stop asking whether I want it turned on every single time I exit Adobe Reader?

t On Edit OK, I figured out a kludge for the first. I renamed accessibility.api accessibility.bk in the plugins subdirectory of the acrobat 7.0 directory. So far this has not seemed to break anything, but I wish there was a less kludgy of uninstalling adobe plugins.

I just went to open Firefox, and it's gone. I had cleaned up my desktop, and moved the installer into the trash (now undone). But I thought it was safe to move the installer once it was installed? Any ideas? I can reinstall, but would prefer to recapture my bookmarks. I'm using Linux, Fedora core 2, but am lately pondering how smart it is for me, who is pretty non-techie, staying with it. A friend talked me into it and set it up, but he moved. I like it, except when I'm totally clueless or when I can't get plugins and peripherals to work.

Thanks for any advice!

libkitty, I'm reasonably certain you can reinstall without losing your bookmarks.

Oh, great! Thanks!

eta: Boy, do I feel stupid now. Apparently I had managed to change the default browser and erase all mention of Firefox without actually deleting it. I'm not sure how exactly I did that, but it seems to work now. Is this a sign that I should move to the evil empire, or a sign that I can muddle through with occasional and much appreciated help? Time will tell.

Don't give in to the dark side, libkitty.