As Richard requested, here's the outcome of the corrupted file problem: Firstly, a VERY big thank you to everyone who called with suggestions, from yesterday morning, right through to 9pm last night and this morning. I should have written your names down, but you know who you were:-) I finally got the two machines networked and rescued the files onto my PC. I also copied all the damaged files and will have to see if anything can be done. Luckily, I have enough to save the job, so shouldn't be a problem.
My observations in the cold light of post-panic daylight? 1.Allways check that everything is compatible with everything, even if it should be in theory - my card reader is fine with my Windows machine and others, yet it and the Powerbook damaged the files - my other card reader, a different make, does the same thing with no error messages. 2. The Powerbook I have here will not reliably burn CD's any faster than 8x without risking errors. It's a 12" 1.3Gig with 756Mb RAM running OSX 10.3. 3. Networking a Mac and a PC is actually not much more difficult than two Windows machines. It took me a long time and some telephone advice simply because it's not something I do every day and there are quite a few boxes to check / uncheck etc, so I can't be critical of the Mac for that. 4. Obviously, make absolutely sure you're happy with everything before using it in anger - I was aware that due to the delivery delay with the Powerbook, I hadn't had time to become totally familiar with it and was uncomfortable, but had no choice. I figured that it couldn't be THAT hard to copy a few files and burn a CD. If I'd had it longer, I might have spotted the file problem. 5. ProDig is without doubt the best discussion forum I have ever been with. To be able to put a question to several thousand professionals of widely varying skills, specialisations, backgrounds and experiences is unique. I received around ten calls and the same emails with concise information. No one individual had the answer, but each piece was important and finally I was able to figure the last network hurdle myself. For those calling in your bosses time, I promise I won't tell!! My Powerbook? I think it's lovely to look at, nicely made, apart from the fault, and very well marketed by Apple. There definitely are things it does better then Windows and I'm sure that there are many happy users out there who've never had a failure. The networking issue was simply down to me and lack of familiarity with networks. Unless I hear a compelling reason otherwise, I'm not keeping it. Neill Watson =============================================================== GO TO http://www.prodig.org for ~ GUIDELINES ~ un/SUBSCRIBING ~ ITEMS for SALE
