Larry spent about two hours last night working on Mel. After carefully taking the modem apart, cleaning and using compressed air to blow dust away from the inside and reassembly (plus assorted other fussing about with Mel's innards), my poor PC is still dead at the scene.

I'm not sure what this means, but Larry tells me the USB port is fried.

Sir Lawrence has decided to get me a new one. It won't be a Mac, but it will be more up to date than Mel and I'll probably be able to transfer my saved goodies to the new PC - something that won't be possible with a Mac.

We're not going to be getting rid of Mel immediately, not until we've managed to save what's on the hard drive. None of our financial stuff is on it anymore, it was all transferred over when Larry bought his PC last year, but all of my written material and the HTML for some of my old designs is, and it sure wouldn't make me happy to lose them.