wellsir, actually I live about 50 miles north of Albany, but thanks for the reply. Re the 30 year old van...I hate to say it but my son used to restore the beasts and for the last 3 years he has been what they call PVS down in a brain injury facility in Kingston NY. Moral of the story: even in an old van USE those seatbelts! Is there a program to slow down the various messages or capture them, the ones that run by so fast as the installer works its stuff? I'm trying to see if OS3.9 actually installed everything. Another issue: the emergency boot disk often shows up as "unreadable" Do ya think this has to do with the PPC card? or something? I'm lost. I have a vanilla a2000, two a4000 desktops and this tower One of the desktops has a cyberstorm as does the tower. I'm running OS 1.3 on the 2000, os 3.0 on one desktop, os 3.1 on the other and maybe os 3.9 on the tower. Except most of the progs won't start. sigh.