Weekends come and weekends go but some just linger for ever. This weekend has seen this computer crashing every few minutes Mrs W catching a chill Master W losing his wallet/having his wallet stolen the fence between our house and next door blowing down This desktop computer (the laptop is away at the menders itself!) has taken to crashing at will on a very frequent basis now. It just hangs with no warning and no reason discernible as to why it crashes and what's causing it. I invested in System Mechanic and The Ultimate Troubleshooter software packages and given that and what we have noticed I took the following action: I have cleaned up the Registry every day for the last week I have stopped several background running routines I have tried to backup all sensitive data As a result of cleaning the registry I seemed to see that the CD ROM or DVD drives we have are causing more registry problems than anything so last night I disconnected both drives and will monitor progress. So far so good, touch wood, spit three times ... Such a situation leads to frustration on a grand scale and to paranoia. Every major task is under threat. We have wasted a few CD disks as we have tried to backup our data and whilst some disks have been written successfully others have suffered a mid write crash and have been ruined. If I could pin this down to Microsoft I could very well start an action against them for wasting time, for wasting resources, for stress and duress. I think more of us should do that, by the way: take these computer wasters to task more often. As a major victim at the moment I am seething every time we suffer a crash and yet we have no idea of how to resolve the issue. The only good news is that by systematically watching the crashing process, we MIGHT have tracked down the source. If it's a hardware problem that could be relatively OK since there is nothing that new in or attached to this desktop: computer itself is three years old, CD Drive the same, DVD drive two years old, printer two years old, monitor 7 years old ... SOFTWARE is a different story since I run Office and Windows XP with all updates and service packs, I am running the latest anti virus package and many of my drivers are new and up to date. Mrs W is a bad patient so she is on her last legs according to herself! Master W was gallivating with a young lady as he lost his wallet and only realised his problem as he got to the stage of buying her a drink ... Yorkshire or what? Our next door neighbour kindly took the fence issue in hand and rebuilt it for us. I helped by doing a tiny amount of hammering right at the end. Well done Paul! That was the weekend end then apart from having baked yet another glorious ginger cake ... email me for the recipe as it's so simple yet so delicious! DW