I have to disagree, bad spots or clusters on a hard drive should not be taken lightly, it is not a normal occurance that you have to live with. It is a sign the hard drive is going to fail, however there are exceptions! Sometimes a software will not work right and your system will lock up and you have to reboot. Your system should normally start scandisk or chkdsk and check and fix errors, but on occasion I have seen where this correction was not done! To test this, I use Norton Disk Edit (I believe there is an old free version of this utility somewhere and you may have to use a utility that can read NTFS like NTFSDOS from Winternals, or after a backup, or if there is no data on the drive, you can use FDISK and remove the partition entirely.) to find the bad spots and MARK them good. I then run a complete scandisk / check disk (which takes extra time) and the errors do not come back! Another scenario, a owner can accidentally drop their HD and cause variosly located bad clusters, but they are usually grouped in only specific locations on the drive (front, back, etc.). As this is a one time occurance (we hope!), you just have to partition the drive arround the errors. The area arround the errors cannot be partitioned and will never be used again. I use this kind of setup to transfer files from one machine to another but not as a permanent installation. Anotherīs screen saver - blank screen problem... you might want to dissable all energy saving settings on your machine. I have a WIN98SE / XP Pro dual boot setup. When the energy setting tells the monitor to go to sleep in Win98SE, my UPS ( too small) cannot take the strain and my system reboots! In WinXP Pro, it wakes up perfectly... everything works. As you might expect, I love XP, I donīt loose data anymore leaving my computer to download overnight and touching the mouse in the morning... ZAP! Howard Rubin Fortaleza, Brazil The NOSPIN Group provides a monthly newsletter with great tips, information and ideas: NOSPIN-L, The NOSPIN Magazine Visit our web site to signup: http://freepctech.com