First Doc Mag

The first Doc Savage Magazine has arrived. It's very fragile, not in the best of conditions, some sticky pages, some torn. The main feature is The Motion menace, and I've not read it. There's also Deap-Sea danger by Alan Hathway, Snake Bite by Harold A Davis, Enemy on Wheels by Laurance Donovan and Murder in his heart by Norman A Daniels. I'm not sure if any of those are pseudonyms of Lester Dent or not. There's a couple of other features also. By the looks of things the person I bought it from paid more than me for it as it came sealed in a bag with a price tag more than what I paid on eBay. Or perhaps that's what a previous owner paid.

Flipping through the magazine I noted something odd (apart from the fact what a weird world the 1930s were, Life on Mars indeed) when I came across a strange report. Page 112 Quote: Not long ago a strange sight was seen over New York City's second highest building, the Chrysler Building...Atop this great structure is a steel spire, and one cold, sharp morning an extension that looked like a streak of black light appeared to rise high into the heavens above this spire. ... Some observers believe that the strange beam of black light was a form of mirage....But a more logical explanation seems to be that it was caused by St Elmo's fire.

True reporting (there were supposed to be photographs) or a bit of play acting by the editors for the fans of Doc? I hope to get more time later to go through the magazine. And of course I'm expecting a couple more which should be in better condition.

More Doc Savage

Still waiting on the arrival of my first Doc Savage Magazine, but in the meantime I’ve bought a couple more, one really cheap. I’ve definitely read one of them before, but it was one of the books I gave away. So, two new Doc stories to read at most. And there’s the additional material in the magazines, other stories and features.

One of the magazines doesn’t look in great condition going by the photo on eBay but the other two are supposed to be in very good condition. I should give eBay a bit of a rest as I’ve spent a little too much this month. Luckily some of it will go on next month’s credit card bill.  But I couldn’t say no to a rare Bob Shaw book going at a reasonable price, then it just rolled from there with offers of books and magazines too good to turn down. I didn’t with them all, but – funnily enough – I lost the cheap ones and won the more expensive ones.

Book is bit on the expensive side

While browsing on eBay I came across a very expensive book.

There was no explanation of why this book, published in 2000, should cost so much: you could definitely buy a house for that amount where I live – whether you’d want to live in it in this area is a different matter:) There's not much information on it online either (not that I looked hard). Only that it's slightly cheaper on Amazon.

The site of the author of this tome doesn't give any indications why two book sellers should value it at six figures bar a penny for one and two pence for the other. Oh, plus £2.75 shipping.

Two Timers

I got the one I wanted most out of all the items I'm bidding on eBay this week. Bob Shaw's The Two Timers in the Gollancz hardback edition. £35 with free postage (postage can sometimes add up to as much as twelve pounds to the price; particularly if I'm buying from America). This is pretty good considering the prices elsewhere start at around about £50 plus postage for the cheapest copies available on the web. And it's a very uncommon book to find on the web, particularly as it's a very old novel of Shaw's. It's said to be in good to very good condition but I'll see what it's like when it arrives, which hopefully won’t take too long seeing as the seller is in the UK. I have an SF Book club hardback edition which I read years ago and found it to be a very engrossing book.

More Doc Savage

After getting my first honest to goodness pulp magazine by purchasing a copy of Weird Tales recently I’ve now bought my very first original Doc Savage pulp magazine. I won the 1938 issue with ‘Motion Menace’ as the main feature on eBay. The condition, like the Weird Tales one, is not great, and the price is reflected in that fact. I got it for £15 and was the only bidder.  I’m not sure if I’ve read Motion Menace. I bought several of the double novel editions issued in the eighties and gave most of them away (can’t remember which but I either sold them to a book dealer or donated them to my local library ; I suspect the former as I only donated to my local library a few times but sold books on a lot of times).

I've a few more items ending over the next few days and hope to win those too, even though it'll cost me a lot of money. Although I've got about twenty or so of the Doc Savage novels – mainly the ones issued in the sixties picked up second hand – I’m looking forward to getting my first Doc Savage magazine. Oddly enough I'm buying the magazine from someone in the UK. There are a fair few of the magazines available from US sellers on eBay but they're asking fifty dollars and above; quite a few of them at one to two hundred dollars. Don't know what the exact exchange rate for dollars and pounds is at the moment, but I'm saving by buying from the UK as I'm getting it post free – although it was probably built into the bidding price – and the postage from sellers in the US can sometimes cause me to think twice about bidding on things.

I also received another Doc novel, Other World, in the post today, and seeing as I’ve finished No Mean City I’ll probably start reading that Doc novel – although I’ve got the newest issue of Interzone in; nothing in that issue has piqued my interest yet.

SF Defection

I've made a (temporary) move away from SF this week. I follow some crime related blogs and No Mean City was mentioned in one of them. I'd heard of this novel before, it kept cropping up here and there. And of course I can't think of No Mean City without hearing Maggie Bell singing the theme from Taggart.

So on impulse I bought it from Amazon with free shipping and it has arrived. I'm going through it at a rate of knots. It's a weird book. Set in the twenties in Glasgow it supposedly deals with the life of Razor King Johnny Stark. But there is very little narrative structure. Characters come and go; pages get devoted to people and then they're off. It's the product of a baker and a journalist, (Alexander McArthur and H. Kingsley Long) brought together no doubt by the publisher way back in the thirties. The publisher says it’s copyrighted but I think it’s one of those orphan works, where the owner can’t be contacted as there are no dates on the copyright page. It was first published in 1935.

It is oddly compelling though and there is strength to the writing that comes through even across the decades. Even through the matter of fact way things are explained (with explanations in English in brackets for those that don't understand certain words) and the lack of a serious plot, the character of those people living their lives in the twenties shines out. The simple thing is that a lot of it rings true, and the book is all the more powerful for that. (Full disclosure: although I make fun of the Weegies as often as possible I do have to admit that I am half Weegie myself, my mother coming from Glasgow, and I did visit her home town a few times when I was young.)

Another link to this book is that I am a fan of Ronnie Montrose. He had a group in the early eighties who released three albums, imaginatively entitled Gamma 1, Gamma 2 and Gamma 3 (there was the obligatory reunion which resulted in Gamma 4). I actually saw them in concert at the Edinburgh Playhouse when they supported Foreigner. Good stuff. Anyway, on their first album, released in 1979, is the song Razor King, all about Johnny Stark. They played that live in Edinburgh, Davey Pattison, the singer from Glasgow, calling it a 'Scottish Folk song'.

I found myself struggling to keep up with the blogs I was following on Google reader and stopped following about ten or so. I wanted to get the number under 40 but failed by a couple. Having said that I sign on over the last couple of days and instead of the fifty or sixty blog posts I have to read there are now less than a dozen. Those ones I now actually read rather than skimming through. Maybe subconsciously I was pruning the ones that posted the most.

Urlg. If I win all the things I'm bidding on at eBay I'll have to fork out over sixty quid. Thankfully the ending times are spread over a week. I hope I win them all, I don't want to be outbid for any of them; some of the things I'm getting are very cheap.

Night Walk, Gollancz, Hardback, ISBN 0-575-02071-7

Night Walk is Bob Shaw's first novel. It is copyright 1967 and was first published in America and then in paperback in the UK shortly after. I have a Gollancz hardback edition from 1976 which I bought in the eighties and I'm sure I paid around £5 or £6 for it when it was 'new'. Since then I took the sticker off, revealing the original price of £3.20.

When I initially read it I did feel that it was a little bit on the long side for a novel, although for a first novel it is full of great ideas and vivid execution of the plot. It's an excellent thriller, with the main protagonist, Sam Tallon, put into an impossible situation. One of the most impossible for any human to be in: the loss of sight. There are plenty of twists and turns throughout the book.

Those of us who have it no doubt take seeing for granted, and damage to eyes has occurred a couple of times in Shaw’s work. There is an interview in Drilkjis number 2 with Bob Shaw where he discusses what he calls the Little Macabre Touch.

As can be expected for a novel dealing with sight, the loss of sight and the regaining of sight, there is a lot of vivid descriptiveness in the prose.

Right at the start of the novel Sam Tallon realises he is in trouble and ensures the safety of the information he had come across the galaxy to get, especially against the hypnotic techniques of the security services on Emm Luther.

Mankind travels through space via portals, and it is the co-ordinates of a new one which is the information Tallon has and should keep from the authorities of Emm Luther, and Shaw lays the foundations of the science of portals and jumps across the galaxy through Null-space.

It is in chapter three, as Tallon rebels against the treatment he receives from the security agencies on Emm Luther, that Tallon’s sight is deliberately and maliciously taken from him after a failed attempt to kill Cherkassky, a highly placed agent who had also taken memories from Tallon. Forced to accept the loss of his sight Tallon is sent to a prison.

In prison Tallon meets Winfield, who – although also blind as a result of a botched escape from the prison – is working on an escape plan using a ‘sonar torch’, and he needs Tallon’s help to complete it and escape. Tallon develops the plan by suggesting the use of small television cameras to beam pictures directly into their eyes. The work to create such devices is started and Tallon spends weeks developing sight for the blind, but using more than just television cameras.

Pretty soon Shaw ratchets up the tension with the news that Cherkassky, whom Tallon had tried to kill, is out of hospital but not fit enough to go to work yet, and so has asked for a ‘working convalescence’ at the prison where Tallon is.

Tallon is successful at using the system to tap into other people’s eyes. It works, but the rumours about Cherkassky are confirmed: he is due to arrive at the prison. But Tallon does not want to be around when he does. The escape begins.

For a first novel Night Walk is inventive, well structured, well plotted and an exciting read. I gave it a quick once over before starting this piece and I still feel that it’s a little on the long side – even though the novel is probably around sixty to seventy thousand words and would be considered lightweight nowadays – but that is more likely to be more to do with some elements of the book not quite gelling with me personally. The book hasn’t dated at all; reading it now no one would place it as being written in the sixties; of course the fact that it’s science fiction helps. But sometimes style and prose – and in particular attitudes – can place writing.

Even after Tallon escapes from prison there are still plenty of thrills and spills for the reader, and Bob Shaw uses the unique perspective of the main character and his method of escape in very novel and entertaining ways. I don’t feel that there’s too much character development of Tallon throughout the book, although the novel is an effective thriller as much as it is good science fiction.

Bob Shaw on t’Internet

Did a Google search for Bob Shaw today, as I do now and then to see if anything new about him is on the Internet, and came across this nice little piece from his native Northern Ireland. It’s relatively new, December 2009.

Odd that the names that come up when I start typing in Bob Shaw include the Pipe maker Bob Sheppard. He was my maths teacher at high school – the other one was his brother George. They were both involved in the school pipe band – who were world champions I think – and the little less local Dysart and Dundonald Pipe Band, who I’m sure were world champions.

Weegies (shakes head)

There's nothing wrong with Scotland nuking Glasgow wouldn't solve, but then we'd lose a lot too.

One of the blogs I follow has this: http://bigbeatfrombadsville.blogspot.com/2010/01/collection-of-thugs-and-harlots.html

I was captured with the quote  "We have great anecdotes of people stopping fights to give tourists directions". From then on it got better.

Oh. There's also some crime fiction news.

Mantrap Caught

One of the more elusive Bob Shaw hardbacks has turned up at a reasonable price. It was a bit more than I hoped to have paid but I let a copy of 1 Million Tomorrows slip by because I thought it was too excessive; obviously someone else didn't. A Better Mantrap was the first Bob Shaw book I bought and still remains a favourite.

Very few copies of the Gollancz hardback edition of A Better Mantrap are appearing online for sale, those that do are quite excessive in price (in my humble wallet’s opinion). There are a couple of Ex-Library editions being punted out for £50, pretty good copies are three figures.

But one appeared that is less than the expensive ones being advertised - the same books which I note have been available since I started searching for books to complete my Bob Shaw hardback collection and which no one has bought at their excessive pricing level - and I snapped it up. Ordered from America and taking a leisurely twenty one days to cross the Atlantic this edition isn't the most I have paid for a Bob Shaw hardback but it's getting there.

Dark Night In Toyland, Gollancz, Hardback, ISBN 0-575-04448-9

Looking back I notice that I've covered Bob Shaw's short story collections relatively quickly and Dark Night in Toyland is the last of his short story collections. With over twenty novels I seem to have concentrated a little more on the short story collections more than the novels. There are four collections in total and in chronological order they are: Tomorrow Lies in Ambush (1973), Cosmic Kaleidoscope (1976), A Better Mantrap (1982) and Dark Night in Toyland (1989).


I've enjoyed the novels of Bob Shaw that I have read but always found that a well written short story can be just as rewarding for a reader if not more so. And with a short story collection you can visit a lot of different worlds over a short period of time, whereas in a novel you are immersed deeply in one world. There are pros and cons for both short stories and novels.

I bought the paperback of Dark Night in Toyland second hand years and years ago and the Gollancz hardback online quite recently, both were mid price: not cheap but not too expensive either.

The difference with this collection is that it comes with a short introduction from Bob Shaw, which the others do not. It's a short introduction but an introduction nonetheless. The collection is dedicated to Arthur C Clarke.

Apart from the book Writing Science Fiction there isn't really much of Shaw's nonfiction available to the general reader, most of it is in hard to find fanzines and short run booklets. There is a variety of his nonfiction work available and some of it can be really hilarious. Shaw's fiction can be a bit overlooked nowadays but that is doubly true for his nonfiction. There would be room for a publisher to issue some of Bob Shaw's nonfiction work to the world.

In the introduction Shaw himself hesitates to define and bracket his stories, but would be willing to discuss it over a drink. As mentioned this is a varied collection - perhaps the most varied in theme and variety of all of Shaw’s collections of short stories.

This collection spans the widest range of any Shaw collection, from 1960 to 1988, twenty eight years and includes a horror story and a fantasy story in addition to the expected science fiction.

The collection starts with the lead story, and the one which Bob Shaw mentions briefly in the introduction, Dark Night in Toyland. And the story is pretty apt for this time of year too as the story takes place at Christmas. A couple worry about their son, who has cancer, and the effect his loss will have on their lives. While his parents worry the child plays with a Biohdoh set he received as a present, creating creatures from the set. Halfway through the story the child slips into a coma. This is a very emotionally based story, concentrating on the effect of illness on people. To describe the plot further might spoil it for someone who hasn’t read the story but it is one of Shaw’s deeper stories.

Of all the realities in existence Arthur Bryant in Go On, Pick a Universe wants to go to one where he is the most ‘perfectly developed’. It sounds like a kingdom of the blind situation but Bryant is assured of a triple chance – three transfers for the price of one; that’s a better offer than Asda or Tesco - and ‘The Probability Redistributer never goes wrong.’ The first two realities he is sent to don’t come up to his requirements; and the third one he can’t come back from. There is some nice humour in the story and a decent, if unanticipated, ending.

I don’t remember Stormseeker at all and it’s possible I didn’t read it when I first got the book as I have a tendency to dip into short story collections rather than read them from the first story to the last, so it’s another ‘new’ story for me. It’s short, only a few pages long, and told in first person. The narrator is able to see storms, in a more unique way that others and much better than any technology. The narrator takes a potential mate on a storm-seeking trip and gets a surprising response.

Aliens Aren't Human is a comic horror story and the one that stays with me most from this collection. The aliens are naive to human eyes but soon learn the realities of the situation. The humour in the story is very slapstick and farcical in a gruesome sort of way seeing as the humour is the result of murderous actions by human protagonists in the story, while the aliens don’t understand the implications or reasons behind the actions. While the humans are trying to kill the aliens the aliens think the humans are doing nice things for them. Bob Shaw calls the aliens Dorinnians, a name he uses again in Fire Pattern, although the two aliens couldn't be more different.

In Love Me Tender Massick, an escaped prisoner, drives across wild country in a stolen swamp buggy, and the petrol gauge is dodgy. He finds a house in the wilderness where he can stay for the night, although the old man there is reluctant at first. There is a woman there and the old man, Cromer, insists she is sick and he is looking after her. Massick wants the girl, but there is a nasty surprise in store.

To The Letter is all about a man, Hillowen, who wants to sell his soul but Zurek isn’t keen on buying it, but a deal is struck and – much to his chagrin – Hillowen finds himself ‘irresistible to women’.

Courageous New Planet is covered in this post.

Cutting Down is one of the longer stories in the book and is about Herley and his visit to Hamish Corcoran, who says he can control obesity with the use of pills. Harley decides to take the pills, is discovered by Corcoran, and a brief fight results in the death of Corcoran. Unfettered by guilt of murder Harley intends to give the drug to his wife.

Hue and Cry is told from the viewpoint of an alien creature trying to kill and eat the ‘two legged food creature’. Turbon is unsettled about the whole affair and when reinforcements arrive to rescue the ‘two legged food creature’ the story ends with a nice twist about the dangerous aliens and the differences between their males and females.

The K-Y Warriors is a bit longer than a lot of the stories in this collection and a lot on the personal side of science fiction rather than technology or aliens and alien worlds. Concentrating more on the relationship between husband and wife Willet and Muriel and their bickering it’s more emotionally intensive and mature than the other stories in the book. Things get strange and intriguing when Willet discovers that Grandma Gina’s fridge runs without being plugged into the electricity.

Dissolute Diplomat is the oldest story in the collection dating from 1960. Aliens detect a terran spaceship entering their territory, against the conditions of a treaty Hal Portman arrives and starts bullying the aliens. They get their revenge – intentionally or unintentionally – by a misinterpretation of a word.

In Well-Wisher Ibn Zuhain, Lord of the Long Valley, sees into the future and doesn’t like what he sees. He demands a change to the benefit of his people from a stranger who grants wishes.

Executioner's Moon is a short story dealing with Dave Surgenor on the ship Sarafand, the subjects of Ship of Strangers. Searching for possible survivors from a crashed ship Surgenor and another crewmember are captured and taken prisoner by a band of savages. The local king has knowledge of local astronomical conditions and uses this to his advantage and control the population: that knowledge is used against him to ensure the two crew members survive the threat of execution.

Deflation 2001 is a really short story, only a few pages long, dealing with union negotiations in a future world and someone is going on strike at a very awkward moment.

Shadow of Wings is the final story in the collection is a novella and undoubtedly a Fantasy story seeing as the protagonist is a wizard and it deals with the last days of magic. The wizard Dardash is tricked out of his self imposed exile from the world and reluctantly accepts a mission to kill the king Marcurades. Marcurades is obsessed with scientific discoveries. Dardash inserts himself into the court of the king and begins to work toward his goal of killing the king and returning to his solitude. But events take a turn and Dardash finds his attempts to kill the king blocked by other magic. The story is finely drawn, the plot rolls along nicely but the ending is reminiscent of the type of ending given in Well Wisher.

Some of my favourite Bob Shaw stories are still in the first of his collections that I read, A Better Mantrap, but I feel this collection is more varied and covers a broader degree of his work. It certainly covers the most period of time but I feel this is the most mature of his collections and the stories herein represent some of the best of his work.

A COUPLE OF NORTONS

I bought Norton Utilities using a gift voucher. There’s now a PC World within a fifteen minute drive from me. It goes over two floors but I didn’t really see much there. I was disappointed about the range they had in the shop.

Norton Utilities was cheap and can be installed on three PCs. But it's not the Norton Utilities I remember using years and years ago. To be honest there aren't any actual utilities in this version. It's basically a registry cleaner, system monitor and other such banalities; the sort of thing you can get for nothing on the Internet. I'll admit a lot of the utilities from the old version that I used – and used quite regularly – were DOS based but there were some useful ones which could have enhanced the package by being transferred to the Windows version. It also required online activation. Not the best of things in my book. The online world has a tendency to change, and I've already 'lost' two programs because they were online activation and the companies are now gone. At least with a serial number alone if the company does disappear from the world you still have the software and the number and can continue to use the product. I'm not sure if I'm going to install Norton utilities on the other laptop. I'll wait and see.

The second Norton involves the fact that over the past week I have again been trying, here and there, to see if I can restore a Norton Ghost backup. It was a resounding success with a capital suck. I don’t know why I bother, and several times I've said I won’t bother again but there’s always something that comes along and gives you hope, whispering in the back of your mind it might work this time.

This time I was trying to restore the backup to a Vista virtual PC. A big problem was that I could only allocate half a gig of memory to Vista on the Virtual PC, and that means it is slooooowww. It would take up to twenty minutes just for Vista to get fully loaded and settled. Another big problem was that it was Vista installed from a disc, meaning Vista without any updates or bug fixes; plain (dumb) vanilla Vista.

Then the Norton Ghost disc wouldn’t read properly, which wasted further periods of time. I finally copied the whole disc onto the hard drive and made that a virtual drive for Vista to access when it started up.

Ghost still wouldn’t play ball. There was some error about destination when I tried to restore the back up, and any time I tried to restore individual folders I got an error about the back up being invalid, which sets off dim and distant memories. I took a note of the error number but it doesn't even appear on the Internet. There is always the possibility that it is but I don't think the backup is corrupt. Ghost can open it and view files, it's just when I try to restore it to anywhere that the program complains.

I could see it being error prone if it was written to a CD or DVD - that's what happened when I lost my hard drive a few years back, corrupt DVD, backup useless - but this back up from day one was written to an external USB drive, which is more or less a normal hard drive.

Norton Ghost used to be such a great program. The DOS version was flawless. The version I have, Version 14, is nothing but flaws. I got a loan of an earlier version of Ghost, version 9, to see if that made any difference. 2004 it came out; it's six years old. Dear me. The good thing about version 9 is that it comes with DOS versions. The bad thing about DOS versions is that Vista spits on them with contempt. Dos is totally gone in Vista, and the file system is NTFS, DOS is FAT32 at best. So I uninstalled version 14 from the Vista Virtual PC and installed version 9 on the Virtual PC.

On install I'm informed that Ghost 9 has known compatibility issues. So it's install and reboot. Ghost wouldn’t even start up as Net framework is required so install - no reboot! But I don't have permissions to run the damn program. First thing is to turn off User Access thingy then reboot. Now it's working fine. All I have to do is... enter registration number for Ghost and reboot. Bugger. On reboot I get 'the data necessary to complete this operation is not yet available'. The problem seems to be that Ghost 9 can’t access or see Virtual PC drives. When I try a backup it can’t find any drives. Virtual PC turned off in disgust.

Weird Tale

So the issue of Weird Tales that I ordered has arrived. My very first honest to goodness real pulp magazine. Over the years I’ve read about them, read stories from them, read people talking about them. Now I have one. I got it cheap because it didn't have a cover and is not in the best condition. However it is the real deal - I bought a facsimile of Strange Tales from Amazon a few months back - and it feels good to hold an original in my hands, even if it is tattered and battered.

There were a couple of surprises. I expected more ads but there are hardly any in the magazine. That may have been because of the depression or it may have been just less ads for that particular issue. July 1933 by the way. One of the ads in particular was interesting. On page 141 right at the bottom was a small text advert for The Double Shadow and five other fantasies by Clark Ashton Smith. I've read very little of Clark Ashton Smith, I have one paperback and although I enjoyed the stories I didn't care too much for his style.

The odd thing is that it appears Smith self published; people could send 25c (coin!) to an address in California and would get the book. The address is very minimal - as all addresses at that time seemed to be - in that it consisted of Clark Ashton Smith, Auburn, Calif. No doubt it was good enough at the time.

Page three of the magazine had a full page advert, and it's the same sort of thing that still appears in adverts nowadays. They take a full page telling how people made lots of profit and YOU CAN TOO (free of course) but never a word about what it actually is they are selling or that people are buying.

The first thing I did was read the Robert E Howard story, The Man on the ground. The title didn't ring any bells but I have read the story before. It's a short sharp story only a few pages long.

Also in this issue, among others, was Clark Ashton Smith, HP Lovecraft and the final part of a Seabury Quinn story. Quinn was apparently very popular when Weird Tales was publishing his work during the thirties. I haven't read any of his works. I have two or three Lovecraft paperbacks and I sort of struggled through them. He's the complete opposite of Howard in that story is not in your face. A lot of the stories I read felt ponderous and slow but that’s obviously because Lovecraft is worshipped almost as much as Cthulu.

I read the Clark Ashton Smith story too; that also was only a couple of pages. I'll go through the rest when I get time - I'm a third of the way through a Doc Savage at the moment. I'm not averse to mixing drinks but don't like to mix stories (Shorts are always ok; either drinks or stories).

Another oddity is that there is a phrase 'copyrighted in Great Britain' on the contents page at the bottom. I don't know why they would mention that.

All in all I'm quite pleased with my acquisition. It's not in the best of conditions and it's not the most sought after of issues but I like it.

Tidying Up

First brief post of the new year, two thousand and ten, not twenty ten, twenty ten is two separate numbers. I hope a good time was had by all.

I wasn’t online too often over the holiday period although I did log on here and there. I didn’t check any email though and am expecting a wheen of emails when I do log into the accounts.

I was trying to clean up the hard drive on the second laptop and gain some space. Although I took a couple of programmes off it ended up adding a little more as I synchronised Office 2007 on both laptops, with Word 2007 taking the place of Word 2002. Hopefully there wont be any more mess ups with documents, with defaults set to the new file format. Suspicious I looked around the program files folder and yes, Word 2002 was still there. For a while. It was quickly howfed, giving back about seventy megabytes of space after uninstall. But I did gain quite a lot of space by deleting the Virtual PCs. I don't use it much on that laptop and perhaps it would be worthwhile totally removing the application as well. Gdoc also came off as I didn't really use it; Jaws PDF creator is enough. GDoc has features I don't need and a new layout which isn't as intuitive as Jaws. Some other minor programmes were also removed including folders uninstall programmes leave behind, empty folders and the hard drive is now looking healthy for free space rather than pretty full up.