The thing is my wife's. I don't know exactly which version she has. She bought it, she maintains it, I'm staying away unless she gets flummoxed.

When she couldn't get it to start or charge because both were dependent on the other, I did some searching and came up with a solution that got her past the problem. This happens occasionally, and she has also used the trick to get other people's units going.

Funny how your advice pretty much mirrors the troubleshooting advice we tend to use in the Windows environment. That really is my point. The only Apple device in our house has proven to be no more reliable than the MS computers here.

I have had some decent reliability in the Windows XP environment, both at home and at work. My work computers have been solid the past 5 years, because of my experience, stable software environment, and a great system administrator who makes good choices. My home computers tend to see a lot more trial type software, yet it has been some time since I did a full re-install. I think the last time I upgraded the hard drive, I just used the disk utility and moved everything over. No problems.

I pretty much expect any program I use to just work. Same as you do in your Mac environment. It sure beats the old days of playing with autoexec.bat and config.sys (with multiple versions kept on floppies depending on which program you wanted to run).