We're feeling really good about this, so I thought I'd shout it among the hills. For a long while, Erin's iMac, bought back in November 1999, was getting a little tired and slow. The Internet was the worst performer, with web pages taking ages to load on both Internet Explorer and Opera. Programs would freeze frequently. We managed to manage the situation thanks to advice from Marguerite and from Chas Martin, but the problem wasn't going to go away without a visit by a real tech support person.
Marguerite proved to be that tech support person. She and Wayne paid us a visit passing through on their way back home to New York City after attending a wedding in Michigan. Marguerite brought more RAM, plus a Norton System Utilities disk and a bunch of other disks and worked on Erin's machine while we lounged around the computer room. The RAM provided the biggest improvement. The machine operates much better with 160 Mb of memory than it did with just 32, and a proper disk optimization took care of the other problems. We now have a machine running OS X that's as fast as it was the day it arrived. Thanks, Wayne and Marguerite.
My own PC continues to plug along. I still can't load Mozilla or even Netscape 7.0 without my operating system freezing at random moments. Crashes occur daily, although I still am making progress on the Trenchcoat Farewell Project. I am saving up money to make the switch.
I was just mistaken for a professor by somebody visiting the department. An honest mistake -- but why should that mistake be one that leaves me grinning?