Oh happy day! Thank you Apenwarr! Now for as long as my Vaio portable survives with only occasional Windows washing (data backup, reformatting & reinstallation of applications every couple of years) I shall be ever grateful I never had the nerve to hang the cds it shipped with on a Christmas tree and install a handy version of gnu/linux. For what it is worth I have hated power suspend functions ever since they managed to corrupt my Micron/Windows portable a couple of times at the push of a keyboard button. The solution was to lose the battery pack and plug in whenever I wished to use the Micron portable. I am unsure whether this disable the keyboard button or I merely had finally learned to avoid the suspend button.

In other news Fedora Core 5 seems unbreakable on the old x86 I am currently frequently reinstalling on. (No sarcasm. I need the practice. It actually seems unbreakable. I can hardly wait to try out 6. Downloading now.) Unfortunately the hard drive is vibrating like it is on its last legs .... I may yet have to look up and purchase some hardware soon.