Well, Frell.

It only takes slimline power, and all my slimline cables were used up. But then I noticed the boot drive takes either oldschool power or slimline, so I switched things around. Drive is just lying in the bay for now, but the machine was becoming unusable with low disk space warnings every 5 minutes as I browsed the web. I don't know if rails are worth a drive back down to Fry's, or I'll order online. I just need to make sure I order just the right thing. It's a slimline drive that needs to fit into a CD-sized bay.

brenda, I secure my network at the router, not the modem. Is 192.168.0.1 your modem? What's the router IP?

Have people heard about the new google gps? People are saying regular car gps is now obsolete.

In One Fell Swoop Google Makes GPS Units Obsolete!

Verizon has been showing off its new Android based cellphone, "Droid." Today came word it ships with turn-by-turn GPS navigation. If you buy the phone this functionality is FREE!

In other words, that GPS you have built into your dashboard or mounted-by-suction on your window--obsolete!

...

Word is this will be coming soon (possibly not quite as fully featured) to my iPhone. Apple and AT&T can't afford not to.

Yeah, I heard that. Since we have a $12 a month non smart phone and aren't planning to upgrade, a one-time pay GPS makes sense for us. (I mean, a Droid phone plus some $70 a month to run it would obviously be more than a $140 GPS.) I was hoping this news would make the prices fall, but I don't see that it has notably.

'Puter update. The data drives are definitely fine. The system drive had a bunch of bad sectors. After running chkdsk a bunch of times with the drive mounted in a different machine, it seemed to be OK, so I put everything back in the original computer and it booted successfully!!

Once!

During that time, the machine was very sluggish. When I tried to reboot, Windows told me it needed to be repaired. So I'm giving up on this drive. I'll get a new one and reinstall Windows and my programs from scratch. At least I know now exactly where things stand. Yay?

Heeeellllp. I am going to bite the bullet and purchase a netbook, probably this week. (Hello, Black Friday sales!) The catch is I have no idea what I should get. I would like something in the mid-range of power, and preferably pre-loaded with Windows 7. (Is that even possible? I have no clue.)

I would primarily be using the netbook to wirelessly connect to a corporate network, and then remote to my work desktop. Anyone have any suggestions?

Well, the 1000HA and it's replacements are pretty solid, but none of the Asus netbooks appear to be availabe with Windows 7, yet.

Windows 7 full bore on a Netbook might be a while, yet.

Steph, I have an 8g iTouch (bought new in August)

I am quite happy with it -- connecting with Wifi to get online, check emails, watch YouTube is easy when you live in a city, video quality is better than our TV. I use it as an eReader through my fictionwise account (but Barnes and Noble has one -- there are a few), bought a phone and wall charger, and watched 4 episodes of True Blood on a recent trip from KC to Minneapolis.

I've got Pandora, but I almost like Genius enough to get rid of it. It's really wonderful. I download podcasts (and some podcast are really free audio books, especially if you're into classics -- check out Lit2Go in iTunes U)

LOVE LOVE LOVE. And then I just use my crappy little Nokia for phone calls and a few texts every now and then.

There are a number of netbooks available with Windows 7 Starter Edition actually. I did a quick search on Best Buy's website and they show 40 different models for sale with Windows 7 at the moment.

Jilli, my recommendation would be to go down to something like Best Buy this week and try out a bunch of the models and their keyboards and trackpads. I've got an early model of Asus and while it is a nice little machine the trackpad and mouse buttons on my model sucks monkey balls. I've played the some of the HP models and prefer the keyboard and trackpads and those quite a bit more.

I have a HP1030 and I really like it. (It runs XP.) My main complaint is that the connections for the AC plug do not fit into the computer snugly, and the plug is constantly falling out, or loosening enough to not be drawing power from the cord. This is my second plug, as the prong snapped in half on my first plug when it was dropped, and they were both like this. The webcam is also pretty useless unless you are in brightly lit places. The keyboard and the trackpad are great.

I use mine exclusively for websurfing, so I can't really speak to how it runs other applications.

Lenovo Ideapad S10-2 review.

Bonus: Comes in pink!