Nice to hear some level headed responses. I will continue with Linux. My only point to the community was to not fall into the same "We know what you need, so just hush and do it this way" mentality that MS has used for the last 20 yrs. By the way.. to martymas; Best to go with DSL thru a NIC card, but I don't have it here so am using dialup. You're right, it did take several weeks and I almost gave up, but someone in a forum walked me thru it. try a Best Tech external serial modem (has to be controller/hdwr) modem or google for an AMI-IA56 internal PCI hdwr modem with Intel 536ep chipset. The