Bob wrote: >The OS is on a small partition on the C: drive. I assume this is common >practice nowadays, but don't know why and it doesn't seem reliable to me.>> It's normal practice to put the OS on one small partition and everything else on a separate partition. With everything on one single partition, if you ever lose Windows or get a bad virus infection and have to reformat, you'll lose everything on your computer. With data and software on a separate partition, you only need to reformat C and your data won't be lost. For the same reason, it's not a good idea to save anything important direct to the Desktop. Desktop is part of Windows and its contents will disappear if you lose Windows. There's an old computer law which says that your system will go down the day before you were going to backup everything. Don Penlington The NOSPIN Group has added a new feature on our website, web based bulletinboard for questions and answers: Visit our sister website at http://nospin.com