My dad calls me last week to say "hi" and the usual chit-chat. And..."Oh, your mother wants to talk to you about her computer." Warning signs in my head go off...
She tells me she was on the phone with Dell support for 3-4 hours and they've not resolved her issue. Seems her monitor is going black intermittently. It was beginning to rain so I cancelled my evening baseball practice. I unplugged my daughters montitor(I have an iMac, YEA!!!) and headed on down to their house. I tried with my monitor and still had the issue. I noticed that she only had 500mg of ram. I tried restoring with the back in time feature of XP and cleared all temp files. No Luck, so I decided to order 2gb of ram and come back. Geared with some advice from some co-workers, the next day, I tried flashing the bios and re-installing the video driver. No luck. In safe mode, there was no issue. On Saturday, I installed the ram and it only made the problem faster. I could hardly even read the screen because it was blacking out faster and more often. Time to resort to format drive and restore Windows. Took a while(another 3-4 hours)after restoring files and programs. She's happy now and I ended up loading Lotus Symphony and asked her to try for her word processing.

Frustrating but now she's back and running. 10 hours, 3 different days and $70 of Ram. We love Windoz.(snicker)