hi thanks to all for your help. to continue with the saga: my system : 166 mhz pentium with 64 megs ram 2 floppies 1.44,1.2 2 hard disks 32gig , 2.0gig ide cdrom what has transpired: i finally got a boot disk to work by using the speakup.i file from the cdrom , the speakup.i on the speakup website would not work at all. i have installed 8.0 and created a boot disk , however it does not have the synth installed in it, so although the system will boot i still do not have speech on it. does anyone have a kernel with dubltalk lite installed in it that you could spare. if yopyou could atttach it to a message, i would greatly appreciate the file. thaaanks for all the help so far. jim bowman __________________________________________________________________________ ---------------> Save the whales, collect the whole set <--------------- |\ O __________|_\______ \_.______________________| * * * * * * * * */ __\____ |=================/ visit me at http://superguru.net