Is there any way to check besides getting a replacement battery and testing it? Would the system clock be having problems if it's the battery, for example?

I'm not sure if there is a way to check except replacement, sorry. I was having some similar issues (random shut-downs, gibberish on the screen) and after ruling out overheating, memory, and malware I changed the battery and it worked. Not sure if it will work for you, just wanted to share my experience. Hopefully yours will be an easy and quick fix!

(I was a bit sad it wasn't the motherboard, since I already had my dream computer picked out)

Thanks for the advice! We'll definitely check it out.

The battery should only cost a couple of bucks, so no great loss if it didn't need replacing.

Resetting the BIOS (by pulling the battery) didn't fix the problem. From googling, it definitely sounds like 5 years isn't an unreasonable life expectancy for the mobo battery.

I still kind of suspect that it's a hardware failure, but going out to buy a battery will give me an excuse to get out of the house.

And just for fun, I pulled the memory and made sure the computer would boot with only two sticks in the various slots. I'm pretty darn sure it's not the memory.

God, I hate pulling and putting in memory.

And now the system won't even POST. We're getting the beeps that mean memory error. So either it was failing and has failed, or by messing with the memory, we fucked something up.

Sigh.

Possible 3G iPhone features found in beta software:

[link]

Anyone know why gmail thinks that I'm in Germany? When I try to access it, I get a page with this message:

We can't provide service under the Gmail name in Germany; we're called Google Mail here instead.

If you're travelling in Germany, you can access your mail at >[link]

Oh, and we'd like to link the URL above, but we're not allowed to do that either. Drat.

For general information about Google, please visit www.google.com or www.google.de.

I started getting that message when I was staying in a hotel in Boston, and I thought there was just something weird with their network. But now I'm back home and still getting it. I can get my mail by going to mail.google.com, but I'm trying to figure out what's making me get this message, and if it's affecting anything else.

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Hil, check your computer's city/timezone settings.