Thank all of you for your suggestions; I think I will try some of them .. but in the future. It appears I'm going to need a new operating system (which I will put on the new PC sometime this year); and I've been wanting to try out the removable hard disks anyway. Running a dual system will be a challenge for me at this point, so I will need to learn more about that. Perhaps I should put off my C# plans for a little while until things stabilize more. It's not that I don't have plenty of other things to learn (e.g., I'm in the middle of learning VFP!). It does seem to me, IMHO, that Microsoft would be more encouraging for us students to learn new technology if they want a new generation of programmers/developers (but they are making money, so who am I to suggest what they should do!) C# does like it might be a great language, so it's too bad I can't just easily plunge into it right now.

Thanks again -- the UT continues to be very helpful to me.
Pete