I'm nervous about giving up a landline and have never owned a cell phone but I have to say, my phone goes out 4 or 5 times per year from, believe it or not, squirrel damage. So, it seems that either solution has its potential limitations.

Plus, my landline phone is electric, so power outages can't be gotten around.

Quick ink question. I have an HP printer that uses the 56 & 57 cartridges...which never seem to last very long. Are the off-brand refurb cartridge dealers trustworthy and, does anyone have a favorite?

I see that one place on Amazon has the tripack 2-56/1-57 on for 34.95. $11 per cartridge seems like a good deal, but is is?

Incidentally, the printer is old-ish, so I'm not worried about warrenty issues.

my landline phone is electric, so power outages can't be gotten around.

I always make sure I have one that runs off of phoneline power only, just in case.

Even if I weren't a luddite in general, 9/11 and the 2003 blackout alone would have convinced me of the usefulness of having a corded landline.

I think if you live in the land of snow and ice, land lines are less reliable, as ice storms or heavy snow have certainly knocked mine out. I have never lost cell use, except for no being able to recharge, but since I work in a hospital which is powered by itself (we use the excess steam from our steam heat to make electricity or something-- we actually sell some to the power company) I can always go recharge

If you have a dial tone, you can dial 911 from a corded phone with or without phone service to that line.

Laga, I succomed to info mercial and ordered the MagicJack. It's $20/year voip. I'm getting it so I can have a local phone number for the main gate to call and be buzzed in. It's not quite a land line. But not a cell. Just need hi speed Internet.

Yes, that's the bundling that would save us $100 a month, if we went with voip. If we switch cable and internet to Verizon we save $60 a month. Right now we have Verizon for the phone and Time Warner for the cable and internet. And we don't even have nickleodeon, I found out when I tried to tune in to the new Wolverine:X-Men.

We have Time Warner bundled for cable and internet and then use Vonage for telephone and have been fine, but we do have a cell phone as backup. Vonage had the advantage of being both cheaper than Time Warner telephone service and not partitioning off bandwidth. It gives us a "land line" for faxing and minutes since we have a cheap low minute cell phone plan.

Anyone good at writing DOS scripts? I want a .bat file that I can execute with a right-click (using the "send to" menu) that will create a copy of the selected file, with the year, month and date appended to the end of the file name, like so:

filetobebackedup.extyymmdd

...with yymmdd being the current date.