Foolestroupe, I went to the Control Panel, and eventually discovered the sound samples.

It seems that I'm hearing what that display calls "Exclamation" (or maybe it said "Exclamation Point") repeated three times. And it's every five minutes, by my watch.

I am guessing that there is some action that should be taken, and the triple exclamation is to bring attention to it. But what? It's not either Norton's or Windows 7's backup function; those are set for automatic.

Seems unlikely it could refer to defragging, since the computer is almost new and has a large hard disk capacity. I'll check that, though.

I do wish computer makers issued a user's manual these days; I might be able to find out there if I had one.

Dave Oesterreich