Craig, Finally got around to using the old PC I picked up - and again thanks. It booted up nicely and I cleaned up the HDD, taking off all the legal programs a student had obviously used it for. Did a defrag and planned to boot up again later to partition and so on, and Ubuntu. On reboot, everything was dead. I don't know, maybe power-pack died or something. A technician friend is coming up to stay in a couple of weeks from Wellington, so we are going have a gander at it them. He is going to put Ubuntu on his Win98 machine at the same time. Cheers, Lindsay R