I spent most of the last week working on my new laptop, trying to get it to do what it was supposed to do in the first place. It now does it just fine. First, I had to do a crash course in Chinese logic and language. The few clues that I got were a little garbled to say the least. Whoever translated The few pieces of tech literature available online from Chinese didn't have a very good comprehension of the English language.

The problem was primarily that none of the updates and drivers had been installed and nothing was working properly. The real culprit was a power management problem that had had 15 or 20 updates to the driver software in the last couple of months. All in all it took about 10 downloads and about 20 hours worth of tweaking to get it running in some semblance of normal computer behavior.

DNS 10.1 and the Office 2003 program I wanted to use loaded quite well once I got all the hardware problems sorted out and disabled the antivirus software and its attendant firewall.

Lunis, thank you for the promo for your preferred laptop vendor. I did go to their website and, once I waded through the quite wordy description of everything, discovered that they are touting a quad-core laptop that weighs about 6.5 pounds and has about a weeks worth of intense hands-on 'rubbing' on it, to borrow a NASCAR term. I expect the thing is probably 2 or 3 inches thick as well. I did see  quite plainly, that it costs about $3200!

Mine cost less than half of that, weighs 3.9 pounds, is only about an inch thick and has a superb keyboard. The DNS performance is also superb with a 2.6 Ghz dual-core Sandy Bay second-generation processor and 8 gigs of RAM.

Well, I'm going to bed early tonight since I haven't gotten much sleep the last few nights. Thanks to everyone for their assistance.

Wizwill