Al:

Your computer success story is nice to read, not so your health report. Wish
you the very best of luck. Myself I had opted out on surgery and the others,
to prefer "watchful waiting". Of course, I am probably a bit older than you,
too.
Only 6sec. to boot? That's amazing, how did you accomplish it?
Really would like to know.

Harry.


"Alton Davis" wrote in message
...
I have a custom made PC that was built in late 98 and a few months ago I
started getting the error "unable uo update ESCD" on boot but windows
would
go ahead and load. A look on the internet said it was the bios chip on
the
motherboard gone bad so I went to a couple of local PC builders and was
told
to junk the PC. I found another Asus P299 motherboard on eBay for $10.00
so
I got it and swapped out the bios chip and then updated the bios to the
latest version. I had always been afraid to try this before. Disabled
things I don't use in bios, serial ports, parallel port, etc.and then
decided to reformat and reinstall Windows. Downloaded all the various
drivers and put them on a CD, did all the Windows updates. Next I
installed
Office XP only installing the features I actually use and then did the
same
thing with the rest of my software. It's amazing how stable WinMe can be
and how fast it boots (6sec) and shuts down (3sec) when it's installed
properly and and doesn't have a bunch of useless stuff loading at startup.

Over the years I've printed many messages from this newsgroup and they
were
invaluable in configuring and eliminating glitches. A few things I
remembered how to do like switching from APM which ME installed to ACPI
but
many of them I had completely forgotten.

It might have been silly to put all this time into an old PC but It was a
good project to focus on while awaiting surgery for prostate cancer and I
learned a lot about PCs. Even got the nerve to do a bios update to my XP
Pro machine.

Again, thanks for taking the time to help people with their problems.

Al