A little purchasing tip: check out eBay when you need to buy software. I have bought numerous software titles on eBay, including Windows XP, Norton Antivirus, Norton Ghost, Pinnacle Studio and others. All of them are fully licensed, but they do not come in a packaged box with with a manual. All of them, though, do have a manual in electronic format accessible from the program’s Help menu. On eBay, do a search for the software you want and check out the options. Pay special attention to the reputation of the seller of the software. Lots of positive feedback is preferable, because you want to make sure they are licensed software titles, not hacked copies. And you don’t have to bid in auctions - you can use the Buy Now option much of the time. Do it correctly and you can save as much as 50% on your software sometimes.

Secondly, an update. Yesterday’s tip on restarting Windows without rebooting applied to Windows 9x. Several people asked about how to do it on Windows XP. The answer is that it is not possible. The reason is that 9x sits on top of a DOS core, whereas XP does not. Therefore, to restart Windows XP, you need to reboot the system.