the background will be changing for 1970PT before too long - and what I have planned will work out better for the lower widescreen resolutions.

Will look forward to see what you have planned! 

I'm posting this personal experience to warn about the risk of keeping your important documents solely as electronic files. Even having a backup, like an external drive, is not fail-safe.

In my case, my important files included a lot of DS material, especially copies of discussions on this forum, and also various typed notes, photos, and other documents related to DS. All of these were saved on my computer hard drive and also on a Seagate external drive. My DS files were not the only documents involved, but a small part of all the things I had worked on over the past several years, including five years of genealogy research and writing projects.

A few days after Christmas, the hard drive on my 5-year-old Dell laptop gave out without warning. Having to buy a new computer was not something I would have wished to do, but that seemed almost a small price to pay in comparison with the thought of losing five years worth of files. (I brought in my hard drive to a tech squad and was told it wasn't readable and even caused their equipment to freeze up.) Fortunately, I had backed everything up on the Seagate device (considered one of the best manufacturers in the business), except for the past month. My greatest concern in the next few weeks, in addition to buying a new computer, was to reconstruct the work I had done and now permanently lost in the past month.

I thought I could breathe easily about all my old files, and didn't even take time to try accessing them for a few weeks. When I finally did, I found that my Seagate drive was not recognized by my new computer. I spent several days in near panic phoning tech people at computer stores and searching online forums for people having similar problems. The tech squad at one large retailer had no clue as to why this should be. At another store, a sales person told me that the problem was the difference between XP - which was the operating system on my old computer - and Windows 7, the new operating system, and the only one available on any new computer now sold (except for Apples). He suggested I might try to install Windows XP on my new computer as well, which he said allowed a dual-boot, and that I would then be able to access my storage device. I searched online and found instructions on how to install XP as a dual boot, but found that I would need the original disk from my old computer having the XP operating system on it. Then I remembered that I had thrown out the disks and things from my old computer, having seen no reason to save anything from a system now considered obsolete.

I tried many suggested fixes I read about on forums, but none worked.

Luckily, I remembered that my local library has some old computers and was able to obtain permission to bring in my external drive. Unbelievably, my storage device was not recognized on the old computers running Windows XP either.

In the meantime I had been e-mailed with Seagate's support for several days, answering dozens of questions and asking many of my own, which always seemed to be only partially answered.

Eventually Seagate gave me a code to download software from their website which would allow my device to be recognized on the XP computer. I was then to make some configuration changes to the device and would be able to access my files on my Windows 7 computer although without full functionality. Now it sounded like the problem was not only an XP - Windows 7 incompatibility, but the fact that my new laptop is 64-bit, where the storage devices are made only for 32-bit computers (whatever that means).

To draw this long story to a close, I was eventually able to access my storage on my new computer and transfer all my old files to the new computer.

My question remains now: how should I backup up all my important files this time? The external drives seem a good bet, but obviously technology can fail or not work, as I had experienced. Jump drives are pretty risky; I've had more than one turn out to be defective, and if they're not used regularly, they can lose their electrical charge and everything stored on them (funny they don't tell you that on the package). There's also a risk of making a mistake with these devices (such as re-partioning them), which instantaneously deletes everything stored on the device. Last year I had looked into a company that backs up your system, but I read of countless problems and complaints from people who paid for this service, including problems with their computers slowing down and freezing from the software that is installed remotely. There is Google docs, which apparently has some glitches, and it appears you have to save one document at a time - not very practical when you have hundreds of documents. Plus they wouldn't be organized in the folders the way you have them on your computer. It's also impractical (for me, at least) to print everything out - that would be thousands of pages, and many of these documents are continually being added to or revised.

So at the moment I have a new Seagate device that I had bought last fall but never used. (The old one cannot be used to store documents on a 64-bit computer.) Low and behold, wouldn't you know, but when I plugged it in, a message popped up saying that this $70 device purchased late last fall is only for a 32-bit computer. Now Seagate has sent me a code to download software for this device, which will allow me to use it (hopefully) with limited functionality.

I don't know of a foolproof answer, and there may not be one.

I just hope no one else has to go through what I have gone through these past few weeks.

Backup your DS files and everything else that's important - but remember that technology has its limits, and there is usually no warning when failure happens.

Very nice, but then blue is my favorite color. It seems fairly easy on my eyes, too, i.e. not too great a contrast with too dark a background and too bright lettering.

I'm glad I went through this thread, though, because I wasn't aware of the Leviathan theme. My new laptop is a widescreen (HP Pavilion), yet the edges are cut off and the background is a bit blurred, so that on the right side I see half of a blurred snake, and on the left side half of the statue of a girl (?) in the antique store window. I didn't realize what this was the antique store window until I saw your screen capture in one of the posts above.

This could also be explained as simply information that hadn't been provided to us earlier, couldn't it? I haven't seen the pre-Barnabas episodes since they aired on the Sci-Fi channel, but I don't think much information about Willie's background was ever provided. The emphasis was on his actions at Collinsport. It could be that he had done odd jobs in the past, and that he had then described this background "off-stage" to Barnabas or the Collins family. Although you may be right that this was probably "retroactive" on the part of the DS writers, I prefer to think that it harmonizes with what little information we had been given. In plays, "off-stage" information is common.

Thanks, MB. It turns out that the problem was the computer, not Windows. I called IBM/Lenovo and it sounded as though this problem is typical because that particular machine is so complex with the way Windows interacts with it. Although the solution might have been simply to erase the operating system and re-install it, I was tired of dealing with the problem and didn't think it should be a problem right out of the box. The clincher was that the battery also wasn't holding a full charge. Too many things wrong right from the start, so I returned it and got an HP Pavilion laptop instead. I like this one pretty well, but Windows 7 is very different from XP and I don't always enjoy having to retrain to do something. Also the keyboard is very "slickery". My fingers slip on the keys ... my old Dell had a matte finish which I preferred. This is my second day of using it, although Day 1 was spent mostly installing things, copying the OS to disk (easy, step-by-step wizard-type thing guided me through that nicely, which I'm sure the Lenovo didn't have). The salesman I talked with practically sold me on Apple, but they're twice as expensive.

I know this has nothing to do with DS - but, well, we do need a computer to access DS Boards, don't we ... so maybe it will be relevant to some people.

The hard drive on my 5-year old Dell laptop went a few days ago, taking all of my data with it, although I do have a backup from about a month ago.

I bought a new laptop (ThinkPad) at Best Buy, and all their computers have "Windows 7 Professional." I haven't kept up with operating systems, Vista this, Vista that, but this sounded like a good thing. Now the problems I'm having are about to drive me mad.

Here are the main problems I'm experiencing.

- Uncontrollable zooming in Word and IE. (Moving the cursor with the touchpad causes this.)

- Moving the cursor up to the toolbar in Word causes the pages to flip up or down so I can't keep my place in the document. The Word document page jumps around vertically, top to bottom when moving cursor on page.

- Pasting with cut & paste won't go where cursor is positioned.

I won't even get into the horrid "libraries" that have replaced Explorer. As far as I can tell, you can't organize folders the way you want to. Instead you have to have memorized what's in each file and then "search" for it.

I don't know if the problems is that I just don't know how to use it after having used Windows XP for the last five years, or if the product is defective. Does anyone else have Windows 7 Professional with MS Office 2007?

Thanks.

I had to go to WalMart again a couple of days ago, but I couldn't find the DVD this time. When I had been there a week or so ago, they had a whole display of vampire movies - that is, all the recent teen-oriented vampire movies, plus the 1991 DS revival. All had now vanished. When I finally asked a worker about it, he said they had changed the featured section to a Harry Potter feature/discount. He didn't know what the price had been on the DS DVD, but as I try to remember, I'm sure it was no more than $14.95, and may have been $10.99 or thereabouts.
 

Has anyone seen this reissue in any stores?

I saw it at Wal-Mart a few days ago, but didn't pay much attention since I already have the DVD set and assumed this was just a repackaging. I know it was inexpensive but don't recall the exact price. Wal-Mart has some kind of deals with some DVD producers, as does Target - for example, both stores had their own 2-disc version of the 70th Anniversary edition of "The Wizard of Oz" about a month ago, and I understand they weren't the same and also not the same as what's available through online retailers. So when I saw the 1991 DS set, I wondered if this was a "Wal-Mart" sponsored re-release of the 1991 DS series. I wish I had looked more closely at the packaging, label, etc. I would definitely buy it if I knew for sure that it was the same as the VHS version.