More worryingly, the battery in the laptop has now completely died. If I put the laptop to sleep rather than shutting it down, it's touch and go whether it will start up again. And if I wander off with it switched on, I run the risk of it randomly dying while I'm away. As we now have a 20 gig hard drive, it takes forever for Scandisk to do its stuff after the machine dies. Having the machine I'm writing my thesis on randomly crash is Not Good.
I've just made enough money from eBay sales to pay off my current lot of bills. I don't need any more, thankyouverymuch. Especially not one that's urgent.