I thought Microsoft had made another 6-month extension of XP's life

You are right - but the same deal as before - upgrade your VISTA laptop to VISTA business and you can downgrade to XP Pro for free. XP can continue to be bundled with teeny tiny laptops, but not with laptops with decent memory and hard drives.

Cashmere,

back up the router settings before you do a hard reset, it might save you a bit of time.

unplug the router for a bit and plug it back in. You can try that before you do a hard reset. You need to do the hard reset while the router is unplugged.

FWIW, are you sure your cable modem is okay? Disconnect it from the router and run it to a computer directly and see if it is working okay.

My concern would be with SATA drivers, do recent version of XP have SATA support on install?

XP has had support for SATA for years.

While you are correct about XP support for SATA drives, ND, it doesn't necessarily have support for the controller. I couldn't install XP-SP2 on my Acer because the installer couldn't locate the Fujitsu HDD. I had to slipstream a new copy of XP with the controller driver added so that setup could locate the HDD and install.

That said, my cheap laptop has Vista and has worked just fine even with 1GB of memory.

Lucky you. My cheap laptop ran like a 3-legged drunk dog with Vista, and that was with 1gb of ram. Works fine with XP and Ubuntu.

ETA: Interestingly, unlike XP, Ubuntu 8.04 installed without a hiccup.

I don't know about Google Reader, but NewsGator lets you group by feed or by date. (I use it when away from home because it syncs with my beloved NetNewsWire client automatically, so I've never really compared it with other readers.)

bon bon,

I'm a google reader diva. I missed your post until Gris responded.

If you do keyboard commands, you can easily group feeds together and read them by group, by feed, etc.

So, for example, I have a set of feeds that are all about my phone. I type in some commands: g t n (n is the first letter of my n95 tag) and it shows me all the feeds in that group.

I can type: g t m and it shows me all the mac-related feeds

You get the idea.

g u d - gets me the dailykos feeds

is this what you wanted?

Thanks, guys. I'll try the hard reset this morning. I know it's not my modem because I'm hooked directly to that at the moment.

In Bloglines, if I choose to read all my updated feeds at once, new posts are arranged by feed. So in the reading pane it shows me, for example, the new posts on Defamer, then all the new posts from Gawker, then all the new posts from NYT.

Oh, I get it. I think the closest you'd get to that with Google Reader is to set the sidebar to show Updated (instead of All) and then click on each feed to read all the new posts. You can either sort the sidebar alphabetically or manually put them in the order you want.

I have all my feeds sorted by category so I read all my parenting blogs at once, then all my food/drink blogs, then all my news blogs.

So wtf is up with bloglines anyway? Besides being down that one day, all sorts of things that were working have gotten all wonky. I started thinking of switching to google reader even before bon bon's post. I'd rather not (just because I'm lazy) - is there any word on wtf is up with bloglines?

GRRRR. I'm fucking something up because I can't get this bastard to work. I'm going to unplug everything for the day and start fresh tomorrow.

Sharp launches world's first LCD TV Blu-ray recorders

Huh.