Greetings, Through the recycle-it list, a couple of years ago, I purchased a dec express from somebody who I believe also subscribes to this list, least he did to the Yahoo version. I found the synth fine but it had a couple of foibles. I say this because another came up on the recycle-it list which I purchased recently and this behaves in a different way. The old one's batteries need replacing, it does not hold a charge very long, I intend sending it to Dave godfrey of blazie who can deal with it, as the one I have just purchased was serviced by him and works fine. I decided to try the new one out so disconnected the data cable and power lead from the old, connected them to the new, did not change any drivers or settings or anything on the machine. Whereas with the old one it simply ignored the pound sterling sign, the new one says u accute. If I read a document, after a fairly short time, maybe a screen's worth, the old one stopped and if I looked at the cursor, it would be more or less in the middle of the text it had been reading. My solution was to touch the control key after it had read, say fifteen or so lines, then re-issue the read command (insert down arrow) for another fifteen or so lines . . . annoying! With this new one, I can issue the read command and so far, it has read without problems. Now, I wonder what is different? Has there been some kind of hardware update over the last three years? Cheers. Colin R. Howard. ** Are you going on holiday and want to halt messages? ** Send a message to access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx ** and in the Subject line type the word vacation ** followed by a space, then the number of days you ** wish to stop receiving messages for, followed by another ** space and the letter d for days. ** To leave the Access-UK list, send a message with the Subject:- ** unsubscribe ** to access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx ** Please do not put text or signatures in the message body ** For other things like setting nomail when on holiday, ** or digest mode, send a message, to ** access-uk-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the Subject:- ** faq ** Please do not put text or signatures in the message body.