Justin, don't know if you were referring to me and my computer or not. But, WOW! That sucker is something! Looks to me as if it could predict weather for several weeks out AND pick three out of four lottery numbers depending upon the same butterfly flapping it's wings.

With a three-screen display. For a species with two eyes. Some folks are fast, too!!

Now, Justin, I ride a bicycle. Average 12 mph around my very hilly part of the world. I'm slow. My idea of a game is solitaire, or chess without a timer. I predict the weather by looking out the window.

That computer would just humiliate me, leave my mind dragging so far behind it in awe I'd probably wind up leaving offerings of food on the desk in front of it, maybe sacrificing small animals there, too. Asking it questions, and waiting for answers to show up on the screen.

M4? How about HAL?

On it's limited behalf, this comp - - - calculator is one I built a little over a year ago for less than $200 and scavenged parts, have added a larger P/S, memory and the CD-RW/DVD since. It doesn't seem that slow, really. I'm trying to think of an excuse to build another one, might have one soon.

On the promised grimmer side, from my point of view, I think Knoppix has taken out my D drive. When I first booted from the CD it mentioned it had successfully partitioned a drive. I didn't know what that meant, thought it might have downloaded some stuff and kept it away from the Windows environment. All I did was tell the computer to boot from the CD, and it did the rest all by itself. Didn't tell it to install.

It ran normally once, but slowly, from the CD. And now I can't get at the programs on D, instead get a message that the drive hasn't been formatted and asking if I'd like to do that.

And I think I've read that if a drive is re-partitioned the information is gone, history, has disappeared into the cosmos. May as well reformat it.

Do you know if that's true, or maybe et does?