Lyns, I've resisted posting on this one so far, as others already have covered the basic advice. Yes, go for superinsulation, make it as tight as it possibly can be, and install the HRV for controllable mechanical ventilation. Ignore any advice to the effect that you don't want to make it too tight, because "the house has to breathe." Spend extra as required for really good windows. They do make a real difference; your energy model for the house will show you that. Forget the whole house fan. It has little use in the sort of house you want to build. Running a whole house fan in hot weather will just draw hot, humid air through the house and make it hot and humid inside. In an ordinary house, there can be times when a whole house fan can bring in cool night air and provide almost free air conditioning. The tight, highly insulated you want to build simply will not gain heat very fast in summer, just as it won't lose heat fast in winter. Your A/C load for summer conditions probably can be met with one ton of capacity, and it won't needed very often at that. Given that you want the house to be very tight, and will have mechanical ventilation always running (at least on low speed), that means less worry about having an attached garage, not more, provided you detail properly your air barrier at the wall between garage and house. The garage absolutely must be outside the house's air barrier. With ordinary construction, and little attention to tightness of the shell, an attached garage would be more of a problem. I am speaking from experience here. I designed the shell of my own house and was on site for the build, advising the crew of particular things I needed to have done at certain times, some of which I just did myself. The structure is a double wall with 12" cavity filled with dense packed cellulose (R40). The attic floor is R60. Basement walls are R20 where there is concrete and R40 where framed (walkout areas). Sub-slab is R20. Windows are triple pane, around U=0.17, and all casements except for some fixed glass units. Not every window need be operable. The final blower door test came in at 0.8 ACH at 50 pascals depressurization. That confirmed the selection of a two-ton GSHP unit for heat and A/C. The gross footprint is 2,000 sq.ft., and there are two levels, so living space is 4,000 less walls, stairwell, and whatever isn't included in "living space." The energy model, which I did myself, shows heat loss at design minimum temperature to be about 22,000 BTU/hr. Worst case A/C load is less than half that. There also is a small woodstove in the lower level, with a firing range of 11-28,000 BTU/hr. Last winter we actually used that to heat the whole house, burning perhaps half time, while interior finishing was going on. It has an outside air kit, so the stove doesn't depend on inside air supply. I like having a wood fire now and then. Last summer, very little A/C was needed; the unit was loafing, coming on just once in a while, and never running in second stage. This winter has not been an especially hard one for really testing the house and heat pump. Still, there were a few nights getting down around zero for a while, and the heat pump still never went to second stage. I have been told by others that superinsulated houses often do test out better than the energy model had predicted. Lyns, you can have the same level of performance in your new house, and the cost isn't all that much more, if everything is done at the right time during construction. I totaled up everything involving the superinsulation part of our new house, relative to "ordinary," and it came to around $20K, about the price of a new car. With the savings in heating cost, the extra cost will pay for itself in less than ten years, then pay out like a slot machine thereafter. If I blew the $20K on a car, in ten years it would be a rustbucket with no value. Where's the "payout" in that? Moreover, the house really is delightful to live in, with no drafts or cold spots, worth every penny spent to make it better than "ordinary."

Jerry the biggest difference is Zonealarm's two way blocking feature which is lacking in the XP firewall. This means if phone home spies or other malware piggyback in on legitimate software you have absolutely no control over it with XP because it only controls incoming things. There is no down side to having Zonealarm instead of the XP firewall. Once set up it is very easy to control. Just pay attention during the download and install so that you keep ticking the free version to install. If memory serves me right you then need to go to your security window and turn off the XP firewall manually.

Owbist - you articulated the decision factors beautifully. And that is what makes it difficult. Presently, all I do is load it on the camera and crop. I know I would like to be able to do some color/contrast/tone/brightening adjustments, be able to edit out troublesome aspects. Eventually, I would like to be able to clean older photos and change colors (I know I would have loved to have been able to change the colors of the walls in my house to assist with paint color choices). Whether I'd ever get to something like swapping heads or filters, I don't know (I don't even know what filters are). Another aspect that is important to me is good photo organizing tool. I've been reading reviews of software editing programs (many free), and the reviews don't even mention organizing photos. I'm not sure if that's bc. they all do it, so it's not the feature worth reviewing, or bc. they don't do it. By the way, this review site is very useful - for all kinds of digital photograph questions. I'll post the link here in case others are interested: http://www.brighthub.com/multimedia/photography/articles/4488.aspx. Now if I knew how to make a tiny url of this, I would have done that. I think I even have that firefox addon, but don't know how to use it yet. I think I'm going to try Photofiltre first. Paintnet also looked good, as did photoscape. All are free. Does anyone here know photoscape? A couple of more questions, if that's okay. 1) why would someone want to resize a picture? 2) what's the advantage to having a card reader get the photos on the computer, rather than just connecting the camera to the computer via USB? Thanks everyone. Lynn.

The first personal budget I ever made was done using a Excel spreadsheet. Then later I have tried many offline and online money management tools like Quicken, mint and moneyStrands for budgeting, investing, managing financial accounts and generating personalized money-saving ideas. But still I'm continuing my quest to find a solution that works well for me. Here is a link that might be useful: moneyStrands