Dana, thanks for the warning - that's a big red flag. I'm planning to wipe it and Linux/Hackintosh it - all of the components appear to be supported under centos and Ubuntu, and that, plus the dual-core et cetera, made it attractive.

I got 80% -- and missed the telephone and parallel cable connectors, both of which I've used a lot. In my defense, I've misplugged the cable and telephone connectors for years now, so it's certainly a habitual mistake for me.

They could have added in the DB25 to 50 Centronics SCSI cable and really thrown people.

If HP Lovecraft wrote C manuals

I can't say that it made me a better programmer, but this mashup of Brian W Kernighan & Dennis M Ritchie's classic "The C Programming Language" with the elder horrors of HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos has alerted me to the urgent problem of inadvertent dimensional rifts that may be opened through poor programming practice:

Cinq adds an extra 10-inch monitor to your laptop

Looking for some extra screen space on your laptop? The Cinq is a 10-inch USB monitor that can hang right on the side of your screen, giving you all sorts of extra room to work with.

In addition to the screen, it's got an SD card reader, which is a nice touch. You'll be able to buy one when it's released in the third quarter of this year for $249.

I spent a good chunck of time on Sunday with Norton Security cleaning virus's off the laptop CJ uses. Everything worked fine when we were done and I was able to do some wireless surfing.

Now, the computer connects to the wireless network. Says it has an excellent connection. My laptop connects and works fine. But neither Firefox or Explorer will acknowledge there is an internet connection on that laptop. I have reviewed all the settings I can think of. We have tried it both wirelessly and direct connected to the modem without any luck.

Any ideas?

Re-boot the router?

If rebooting the router doesn't fix things:

It's possible IE and Explorer are still partially infected.

Alternately, are you sure you're connected to the internet? Do other programs that use the internet work? Can you ping stuff? (Open a DOS window, and type

ping yahoo.com

hit enter and see if it gets packets back.)

I rebooted the router and that didn't change anything. We are heading out to karate, but will try to ping Yahoo when we get back.

Well bless. It doesn't return any packets. I get the "ping request could not find host...".

Why would the Network Connection view tell me there is a good connection when there isn't? I'm beyond confused now.