Editorial In the May issue, I always announce the winner of the SynTax Contributor of the Year, so ... can you all hear me at the back? This year was very closely run - we've had a close finish before, but this year was exceptionally close ... we're talking photo-finish time. Dave and Keeks have been neck and neck with only 2 or 3K between them since Issue 67, a year ago, with Dave consistently in the lead. Since both of them have long pieces currently being serialised, I decided the most fair thing to do was to print enough of both in near enough equal amounts so that the lead was kept the same, making Dave the ultimate winner with 241+ points and Keeks in second place. The third prize went to Dorothy Millard. Well done to all of you - I hope you'll enjoy your prizes of Myth and Magic figures and free issues of SynTax - 6 to Dave, 5 to Keeks and 4 to Dorothy. Dave of course also gets a base for his figure with an engraved plaque on it. As the competition restarts, Carolyn, Neil and Diana are leading the table so we'll see who wins in 2002. Well, sometimes the two months between one issue of SynTax and the next go by exceptionally quickly, and this has been one of those times. The last few weeks have been taken up with a happy spell of upgrading my newer PC. I bought a bigger (40 gig) hard drive for it, specifically for video editing which needs as much room as you can spare. And one of the CD drives had stopped working so I thought I might as well fit a new drive at the same time. But after doing this, I couldn't get my WinTV card working, very odd. It reported a device driver conflict, but Windows didn't agree. I was left like piggy in the middle, not knowing which to believe. Alex suggested I went up to Windows 2000 which sorts out all the IRQs itself, so this was stage two. Of course, this meant I also had to find new 2000 drivers for everything ... and the Windows 2000 drivers for the TV card threw up a different device error! Worse than that, my video editing card isn't compatible AT ALL with 2000, and since it's a hardware not software incompatibility, Pinnacle said the only solution was to buy one of their higher spec boards at about œ300. I reformatted the hard drive, reinstalled Windows 98 from scratch, then installed 2000 to give a dual boot system. This still didn't help the TV card which wouldn't work under either operating system, but the video editing card seems to be fine on the 98 partition. The solution with WinTV was to buy the USB version, thus dispensing with the card and possibility of conflicts and when I fitted this it worked a treat. It's the first experience I've had with USB devices and I'm really impressed with how convenient they are. And I'm equally impressed with 2000 which is a very user friendly system, with some very nice features. All of this, of course, has nothing to do with SynTax or playing adventures except that in previous months all the messing around would have delayed the magazine considerably. But in our book-free incarnation, I've saved so much time through not having to lay out the book version that the mag is still pretty good to time. I do still regret having to drop it, and feel that it is in many ways a step back but time-wise, phew, it's taken off the pressure enormously. I did, unfortunately, lose two readers but I wasn't surprised as neither have the equipment to run the disk version - one still has an ST, and the other only had a 5 1/4" drive! There have been two minor changes to SynTax this issue. One is the addition of ICQ details to the email section. If you have some to add please send them in. Secondly I've included some longer files this issue. Now, I assume that everyone is now using SynWin exclusively even though the DOS program has until now always been on the disk too. The long files don't scroll properly under DOS so from this issue onwards I won't be including the DOS reader. You can, of course, always add it from an old issue. Thanks again to all this issue's contributors as we enter the 13th year of SynTax. It's amazing to think back that far, to how different I was then in my mid 30s and now, here I am, with 50 on the horizon. It just doesn't seem possible. Will SynTax be here in another 13 years time? We'll have to wait and see! In the mean time, please keep sending your contributions and enjoy the first part of the summer until I see you again in July. Sue - o - - o -