One of my friend's families has two computers, an old Gateway Pentium 75, and a P2-333 I built for them (Tyan MB, good quality components.) She was checking her e-mail (Hotmail) the other day, expecing an attachment from a friend of hers. Well, there was an e-mail from that friend, and she tried to open it on the P2-333, but the message "just came up blank" (which makes me expect Badtrans, as that's how it generally appears). So, she tried it on the P75, same thing. The next day, she said that the P2-333 locked up, and she went to reboot it. When she rebooted it, it just started beeping (it's the POST beep.. didn't write down the sequence of beeps yet.). She called me, and I told her something probably went bad. Funny thing is, two days later, the P75 started developing problems with it's printer, and then all of the sudden, it locked up, when she tried to reboot it, it did the exact same thing as the P2-333. My best guess on this is that the virus that was in that message contained some code to erase the CMOS or something along those lines. I heard someone mention that one of the viruses going around can do this in unusual cases, but didn't really pay much attention to it. Anyone know more than I do about this? I suppose it's possible that there was a major power surge that sent both of them spiraling down, but they are both behind good quality surge protectors, etc, so it'd have to be a pretty big spike.. I haven't taken the computers home and ripped them apart to figure out what the exact problem is yet, but when I do that might give a little more info. Needless to say, I set them up with a new P3-733, and they aren't going to be using it on the 'net until it's got a virus scanner set to update daily automatically. :) I wish I could convert them to Linux, but, not that family yet.. heh! -- Nate Carlson <natecars at real-time.com> | Phone : (952)943-8700 http://www.real-time.com | Fax : (952)943-8500