Thanks for the clues, Joe.

I found myself wondering. During the past few weeks I've been on-line only sporadically because I recently opted to drop my dial-up connection in favor of cable, and for maximum flexibility for my wife and me, I've been struggling, with little success, to set up a wireless home network. I just learned recently that a friend writes books on this sort of stuff, so having reached a point of extreme frustration, I picked up the phone and called in the cavalry. He came over yesterday and set the system up for Barbara and me. Bless his heart! It works like a charm! Bloody uncanny!

The first thing I did this morning was to go cruising cyberspace. Things load in the blink of an eye. Incredible! It's a whole new world. Not just streaking along at warp speed, it's practically instantaneous!

So I zoomed in on Mudcat. And it took   f   o   r   e   v   e   r   to load. Same for individual threads. 30 to 45 seconds, sometimes over a minute for a page to load, not always, apparently, depending on the number of messages. And sometimes the little green worm at the bottom of the page crawls halfway across its box and just stops.

I''m fairly computer literate, but I'm no whiz, and I just spent a couple of weeks ripping out what's left of my hair while trying to work my way through what is touted as being a fairly simple set-up process. Nothing like this for getting clue as to just how frustrating computers can be, so I'm not about to bitch about other people having computer problems.

But--beside whining and complaining and/or trying to learn patience, is there anything anybody can do to help?

Don Firth