Guess who came back to stay? My laptop ... hurray! Cost me a small fortune which someone said I should really have avoided by buying a brand new laptop and selling this one for scrap. Had the cost of the repair been just a little bit more, that could have been sagely advice and next time will see me taking that course of action. Laptops are brilliant as they provide oceans of flexibility in a tiny package but when they go wrong: it's really difficult to find someone even prepared to look at them let alone fix them spares are hideously expensive I suppose the expense comes from the idea that most laptops are owned and run by businesses/business people so their repairs are paid for out of business funds and not private pockets. Take a look at the desktop market now where there are full PC systems with Pentium 4 technology for as little as £299 inc VAT. However, the laptop came back with software called Roxio installed and large as life on the desktop and it came along with the wuamgrd.exe laden virus. Instantly I started getting problems and I thought that they hadn't fixed the bloody machine despite having a new battery and Pentium Processor. I ran my anti virus software but it found nothing that could explain what was happening; but then I found that wuamgrd.exe was running. Now I carried out a web search and learned that it was a little known virus that most anti virus checkers don't know about. Decided that it came along with Roxio so uninstalled that software and hey presto, no more wuamgrd.exe. You definitely need your wits about you these days. Speaking of viruses I am pleased now that I have got Office 2003 back as Outlook 2003 deals with viral messages and junk mail really effectively: almost seamlessly. Now I don't even need to look at these pox ridden messages as Outlook does it all for me. Trying to get my backup done with a DVD writer in the desktop, now there's another story! Happy easter! DW

Fingers crossed, knock on wood, don't tempt fate ... the horrific error 404 hits that I was getting on my site seem to have stopped all of a sudden. No idea why but I've been clean since February according to my web stats pages over at my ISP. You should have seen the numbers. When I investigated, though, I found that they came from such things as a spacer.gif file being out of place and miniscule things such as that. I have a nice new 404 page too, by coincidence: I built a couple of nice looking, albeit amateur, graphics for the page. Worth making a mistake just to have a look see! Anyway, I fixed a few and you lot helped me to find other things so well done to anyone who helped. Aaaah the relief! Hope they don't come back, now. DW

Have you noticed, surely you can't have failed to notice, that those inadequate young boys who wear baseball caps indoors and have jeans with crotches hanging round their arses are at it again? Hundreds of viral messages are pouring into my email account every week now. As if I'm really taken in by their convincing and witty entreaties to open their pox ridden files and have my computer flooded with their own version of whatever it is that turns them on. I really don't want to have to change my email addres but I've done it before and may need to do it again. This is all in addition to the spam that tells me I needn't pay a creditor again; how Uncle Sam will provide me with free property; don't I just love Java coffee; Viagra ... it's better than viagra. And so on. They are all dumped before I even see them once I have their subject or email account in my Junk folder. Waste of time and effort I'm afraid. DW