hmm, winxp pro that Stormrage is using cashes at least twice a week, no modification done to it. remove the m$ spyware from running and it settled it down a bit. now only had hd power flicker five or six times a day. yup it is windows doing this, because when I ran linux on the exact same machine, there were absolutely no problems with the hd nor a single crash. yesterday, I was just plaing around with the hair / tree feature and hit render, by by poser in about a quarter second under xp. never did that under 98. took the hd out of her comp to fix another one, had to completely re-install xp as it had lost all data about being installed. xp a good os? not from what I have seen. and nope, I wasn't impressed with 2000, or 98, or nt. ~wandering off to install corel on my linux box to grab a screen shot of the display for the arguement about linux being console.~