You can buy a decent hard drive, new, for anywhere from about $50 and up. Maybe a new one hard drive would be the answer. Or better yet--maybe it's time for a new computer.

Do you have up-to-date firewall and antivirus software? Do you open spam or attachments? I'd get an email program from a provider who already filters it (Earthlink, AOL, all of them do it, but you can get free email like Yahoo mail that is also filtered).

There is a long list of suggestions to post--go take a look at the laptop thread that is running now, I just posted stuff there.

After all of the grief this computer has given you, perhaps it's time to buy a new one. Start with the basics (a CPU with the motherboard and a CD and floppy disk) and reuse what you can (monitor, keyboard, speakers) if affordability is the issue. And get a new operating system, whether XP or Linux, that's up to you. But with the old equipment and software, fixes get harder and harder to do.

SRS