sid is right. i have also found that most of the laptop users keep their machine ON ALL the time. that's BAD. although electricity is not much costly here in comaprison to what you earn, you need to give the laptop a complete rest whenever possible, its a MACHINE after all. okay, if you are TOO lazy to shut down and reboot, then one better thing that you can do is go to the power management console and define some better power saving schemes. for instance, run the screen saver after going idle for say 2 minutes. and turn off the hard disk after say 30 minutes. know what i am saying? its always better to provide maximum power comfort to the machine. Dell, in spite of the power problem, is an excellent machine when handled properly. Loote