Harry, you are so kind. Half of what you said flew RIGHT over my head - (for instance, all I really understood about the md5 thing was "if your knoppix works, then...) Oh dear.

I have always been the sort of person to box things up (I mean, literally. Throw reciepts, unopened bank statements, McDonalds wrappers) and carry it to HRBlock. I say, "Here. You fix it." The oil never gets changed by me. My houseplants die because I don't have a service. And.... I've never had a catastrophic computer failure like this. I'm tempted to carry the thing somewhere and say, "Here. You fix it". But a) I don't have the spare cash to do that, and b) the LAST time HR Block messed with my taxes they messed me up royally. AND - when I got that linksys router and dsl modem, the phone company dude installed it (he was being nice). Since "he wasn't supposed to" the phone company won't come and fix it. I know NOTHING about it, nothing at all. My own fault, really, on both. So by principle i'm not letting anyone touch my computer unless I'm positive that they have a clue.


BTW, I had no idea what sort of CD writer was in this thing - no idea what's in mine - I really have no idea about anything. All this technical info that you say "it would be helpful if you'd...." well, 99% of it - it just never occurred to me to put it in there. Either didn't know it existed, or wouldn't have occurred to me it was important. I'm sorry, and I thank you so much for being patient with me!!

You, Harry, have a clue. I'm half tempted to fly you here...

Except you're right, I do need to learn this stuff. Really, really need to learn it. If you can point me to a *real* "for total idiots, no really fools" place I could learn about that router... I'd appreciate it. If it's going to talk about bitstreamchecksumfirewiregooblygunk... I'm more of a "plug the green wire into the blue hole, then do this to get to a command line, then type ____________" type person. I don't need to understand it, I just want it to work.

Thanks for listening to me whine

On the router issue - I guess we're technically networked, these two laptops. We can't see each other on the network. Don't know why. Can't get Northstate to tell us why. (They will admit that since we can't, the dude who set things up perhaps was inept - but in a year and a half, that's as far as I've gotten). So I wouldn't begin to know how to make the two computers "see" each other.

Here's where I'm at. I took the advice of Rusty and got on the #Knoppix channel on IRC (WOW - that GAIM thing is EASY!! I like it ). A couple of guys there took me on as a project and walked me through a few things - I have a... NTFS? The opposite of FAT, which is what most folks thought I would have, hard drive.

They taught me how to make a folder on the desk top (which somehow only exists in the ether) and make zip files there, and then send THOSE through gmail. I can't add too many files to them, because it's all happening in the RAM. (they warned me, and I know now that too many really DOES cause a meltdown!)

So that's what I'm doing now.

The biggest snag I am running into is that random windows open (and sometimes, close or take action). Mostly it's if I hover the mouse over a window, a file item, or an action button (like submit/preview at the bottom of a post, or "send" on an email). A few minutes ago, a gmail screen just appeared out of "nowhere" - it's something that, if I'd been hovering the mouse cursor over, might've come forward... but I wasn't. Earlier, when I was adding stuff to an email, it sent right out of the blue... and the mouse was nowhere near it. It's not disabling, more of an annoyance... but maybe there's something, somewhere that I can tweak to fix it? I have a toshiba touchpad mouse - I'm really really not sure where to look to find out what version, etc. it is. If you could give me some hints as to what folder it's in, I can let you know if you think that might be the problem. Or if there's a way to type something in the konsole and find out, the guys on #knoppix had me do that earlier to sort the ntfs/fat issue, so I know how, sort of.

Thanks for all your help!

Kathi