wow thanks PuntoMX - i have been drowning in a sea of unknowingness there was obviously some sort of driver glitch with the NVIDIA GeForce 6150, because Windows tried to do an automatic update - it succeeded, plunging my system into 'screen black' from which it heroically recovered a couple of times, then went belly-up about 3 days ago ~ no Bios info, no Safe Mode, nothing: so i figured the best move was to swop motherboards rather than claw the nVidia back to some unstable half-life only for it to fail on me again? your suggestions are cool - something positive for me to consider