Robin,
I've learned a lot today. The flat panel monitors don't have the same ratings like the CRTs, no .27 vs .25 pixel stuff. The contrast ratio is important. The higher the number the better, and consequently the higher the price. Good to know.

I swatted sales people off all day. I needed to just look before I could formulate my questions. I picked up the stuff like power strip and the central power thingie for the computer. I found the wireless router and a network card for the remote computer. I looked at HPs, but find though there are several of the "media center" models available, none of them have any expansion slots. It seems that when they put in the tv/radio receiver stuff and the AV plugs, and beside that they put in the port for the HP-specific removable drive, they took up a lot of space. I like what I see on some of them (nice speed, amount of memory, amount of RAM) but there is no room to do more than what this computer is set up for now. I have to add in several features that would have to go on USB plugs, and there are only six total. So unless they can allow the ordering of these features in a larger tower, this isn't quite what I want. It also seems that the backup removable drive is HP specific and I'm afraid I wouldn't be able to remove the data, if necessary, with any other kind of machine.

The Dell machine we bought 18 months ago no longer exists, though the system does, but it has many improvements. So we're still looking there.

Insurance folks will probably be here tomorrow. My son came down with this A-California flu over the weekend, so he'll be here sick. The kids' dad is out of town this week, and I'm not leaving a child home alone in a house in which the door was kicked in last week. Hopefully I'll get the door fixed this week, once the adjustor tells me what latitude I have regarding the repair or replacement. I'd like to reinforce it. I need to buy computers. I need to get my son through the flu. Oy. What a week this will be.

SRS