Not too long ago I spent several months worrying about pending hard drive failure on a machine because of the horrible noises "the hard drive was making" - but the noise went away when I replaced the fan. ...

It can be so.o.o confusing.

I run Win98SE, and don't have a problem with leaving it on for weeks at a time. The key is that Win98SE, like most systems, suffers more from "memory leaks" if you are using a lot of "virtual memory" via temp files on disk. Mickey$oft says that 64MB of RAM is enough to run Win98, but its sort of a "joke" to try to run that way. My memory leak problems (time-dependent crashes, usually just "lockups with no bluescreen) all went away when I went to 96MB, and I currently am running at 512MB RAM.

Routers and Hubs are two different animals, but for the simple home LAN a Hub is sufficient. I've been running a "Workgroup" LAN using an 8-port Hub for over 5 years now, and currently have 4 machines set up - through the Hub - to use the modem on one machine via ICS (Internet Connection Sharing).

There are situations in which one machine needs two separate NICs (Network Interface Cards) but in many cases you can get by with one NIC with two NAs (Network Adapters). A lot of confusion has been generated by the common (and despicable) use of NA to mean either the hardware or the driver software.

The machine that connects to the web/email and shares the connection with other machines on a LAN must usually have two Network Adapters installed. This is a software setup installation. In my installation, the master machine has one NA linked to the etherlink card (NIC) to connect to my LAN, and a separate NA linked to the modem.

There are known problems associated with using two (or more) hardware NICs of the same brand and model in a single machine - usually resolvable, with the simplest solution being to replace one of the cards with something from another vendor. There are a couple of articles on this at the Mickey$oft Knowledge Base website. The 3COM 3C09 card is one commonly cited - but then it's in a lot more machines than anything else.

There is a good possiblity that the symptoms described are related to the "power management features" of the machine, but there are too many variations (and too little documentation) for much in the way of "remote diagnosis."

With the possiblity that you may have a "failing" hard drive, frequent backup is, of course, mandatory. Be advised though, that while Microsoft is big on "backup," they're not really with it on "restore." The Win2000 Professional Resource Kit manual lists 84 separate index entries on "backup," but so far as I have been able to determine, the work "restore" does not occur in any Mickey$oft documentation - except in the KB article that admits that WinXP backups using the official XP "backup" cannot be restored. (Oooops!)

There is an "official" procedure for "mirroring" a Win98SE system so that it can be restored to the same machine, but it is somewhat arcane. If you have original installation CDs, and you back up your data, you shouldn't really need it.

John