At work today there was yet another laptop meltdown. This happens on a semi-regular basis, mostly because the laptop in question is an ancient IBM Thinkpad 570. And amazingly bad luck plays into it too. Last time this happened, I used my duct-tape jerry-rigging skills to get the machine back up an running by starting in step-wise safe mode and stepping through the startup to find the bad command. It turns out that for some reason the Hibernate line in Win95 keeps causing the error. Which is odd, as when I try to disable hibernate mode, it tells me that it isn't even installed. This time around, a co-worker managed to get it rebooted into normal safe mode. Now, this is good and all, but that means you haven't loaded many of the drivers, so the networking functions are going to be very curtailed. A fact apparently missed by the gaggle of co-workers trying to resurrect the machine. I made the innocent remark that perhaps because it was booted up in safe mode ... "NO! You know a lot of things about computers, Gene, but THIS you do not know!" An hour later I stole the laptop, rebooted in step-wise safe mode, bypassed the hibernation REM line, and got it running with full network functionality. Of course, I don't know how to get it permanently fixed, but I guess that's part of those things I don't know.