Ta to all for help with the alarming pages_failed messages. I now understand that 1. I shouldn't set a large cronjob to run every minute by mistake ;-) 2. Kernel 2.2.18 is not so hot on memory management and i need to do my first new kernel installation 3. I need to set sysrq in some boot script or other to avoid crashing out like i had to yesterday. Now I can spend the next month trying to find out *how* to do these things...whoohooo! Sorry if I caused any confusion cross-posting on two lists. Some interesting merge talks coming out of it though. Jenny.