Well, I'm at home and I'm on-line. On one hand, I'm quite relieved, because last night, I was cringing in fear that I had somehow permanently damaged my modem. On the other hand, I'm a little annoyed-- okay, actually I'm a lot annoyed-- at the extreme suckitude of MicroSoft Windows ME. I hate it, I really do. It's unstable, it crashes constantly, and now it won't let me use most of the new memory I purchased.

Turns out ALL of those problems I described this morning were caused by the simple act of trying to use too much RAM with WinME. Before I did anything else, I opened the computer up, took out one of the DIMMs, and then closed up and started it. Everything was dandy. Just like before. Then I put it back in, and I was back in Borkensville.

It seems that 640 MB is the maximum RAM memory limit under WinME, at least on my machine. If I go any higher, my hardware won't work. I used workaround #2 (as described in Bo's link) to have WinME only use 640 MB of the 1024 I have available. This sucks because, well, that was I had after I bought ONE new memory module. The money I spent on the second one was wasted, at least until I get a better operating system. Oh well. Someday I'll upgrade to XP, and then my troubles will be over. (yeah, right.)

Gri"thanks for your help"shny