- Yes, it's XP.

- For the last few months, when I press cntrl/alt/delete, Task Manager fails to come up. I suppose there's another way of finding it - I'll poke around and see what I can come up with.

- Do we have to bring pdq into it? (A little humour there, folks).

- I'm going to put all my word-processed files onto a flashdrive, before anything else (they're the only ones that matter - wait, I have a ton of audio files I'd hate to lose - ).

- It may be that overheating is the main problem - I've noticed that the ol' pc does seem warmer in my lap than I remember from the halcyon days of its youth. But then, the question is, is there a cure? The openings don't seem clogged, and as I've mentioned, I have an external fan in a kind of a tray that sits under the pc ....