...the BIOS battery dies. This just happened to me. I was having to set the BIOS date and time when I started up, but I had a spare battery (good old CR2032!) and now it's fixed for another few years. I'm not sure how long I've had the motherboard, but the Duron 1200 CPU has been around for nearly six years according to this comprehensive list.

I've had a few issues with the computer lately, mostly down to my earlier mishaps. I managed to get printing working again after bypassing the official way of installing CUPS. I still have a few issues including the screensaver not turning the monitor off. Yesterday Firefox stopped working completely. It seemed to be due to some sort of file corruption, so I ended up re-installing it. I also lost sound from the web via Flash and Realplayer, but that's still under investigation. Perhaps when the next version of Ubuntu gets released I'll try a fresh install in hope of fixing all these niggles, but I shall be careful to preserve all my user files. I'll just have to re-install a whole load of stuff. The graphics card is going to have to come out as it's making a lot of noise whilst not giving me much benefit. I just hope this doesn't mess things up again. I could wait until I do the re-install to be safe.

I just took delivery of a smart new DVD player. It's a Sony DVP-NS76H. I've not bought Sony stuff in the past, but this got a good rating from Which. I've plugged it in with a composite video cable to the TV and it looks good so far. Next steps are to make it multi-region, which may need my One4All remote, and set up my Harmony remote to work with it. My old DVD was an Acoustic Solutions unit that came from Richer Sounds many years ago. It has worked fine and is being passed on to someone. The Sony has features like HDMI and progressive scan, but these will not work with my current TV. I'm holding off buying a flat screen for now. The price/quality ratio should improve and settle down in a couple of years.