[ale] Tendency up which to avoid looking things

[Rafos701 at aol.com]

I've subscribed to ask some questions, since scheduling had prevented my attending recent meetings. =
(0) Is there a way around mangling long filenames when copying [long filenamed files] Â to fat16 partitions?
(1) While I have run with and without reiserfs, and with swap part'ns half and the same size as RAM, sometimes there is a nearly constant activity in noise coming from my hdd. Does anyone know what this is, should I be as worried about it as I am, (since I'm using expensive laptop drives?) I am going to check out some Dr Dobb's Article on a type of thrashing which might explain this, but it seems inconsistent that a product of cutting-edge SWE's like Linux wouldn't suffer from any such flaws. (I will be psyched, hearing about pre-emption somewhere, if devices can no longer hang up the prompt.)
(3) Does anyone have a line on someplace where the author of the above questions  can get a job? I have no experience, a '98 A+ certificate, and used to know enough to get a B.S. Any tips will be appreciated, thank you.