Dan, Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that monitoring ship's systems on a computer is a bad idea. In fact it is a very good idea, I would like a running indication of temperature, oil and water pressure, fuel quantity, rate of fuel consumption, speed, etc. on a very easy to read computer display. What would be especially nice is if the computer could interpret the data and tell me if I am getting dangerously close to the limits of operation and possibly suggest corrective actions. This type of status display could be implemented quite easily, although not inexpensively. Present laptops have more than enough computing power to handle this job along with all the other tasks we throw at them. If you want to do this on your own boat, I suggest you visit the website of OMEGA.COM, the largest seller of measurement and control instrumentation. They will send you a free CD with hundreds of megs of measurement and data aquisition information and a complete product listing. If you ask them really nice, they will throw in a bundle of Dilbert cartoons. My point was that alarm systems have to be much more reliable than the devices they are protecting to have any real use. Tne mean time between failures (MTBF) of an alarm system has to be at least an order of magnitude greater than the failure prone device. Thus if you expect one engine high temperature or oil pressure warning a year, prudence would dictate that the alarm system have a MTBF of at least ten years. If your experience with computers is like mine, I experience at least one hangup requiring a reset a week. And I have very reliable stuff. In a former incarnation I was a Senior Systems Engineer for an aerospace company and was responsible for all the cockpit instrumentation of a series of advanced fighter aircraft. There were hundreds of complex systems aboard, each with an alarm. Clearly there was not enough space in front the pilot to mount all the warning devices. We settled on an alarm panel containing warning lights and indicators tucked back out of the way next to the pilot's right elbow and a single bright universal warning indicator in front of the pilot. When that light went on, the pilot was informed that something was wrong and he then turned to the alarm panel to find out exactly what the indication meant. In later models we supplimented the alarm panel with a recorded woman's voice telling the pilot about the trouble. In those pre-feminist military days we figured a woman's voice at 30,000 ft. would certainly get a pilot's attention. This was in the late 1950's, so you see the problem has been around a long time. But let me repeat my main point. Run a parallel computer mediated system to get status information about ship equipment but keep your alarms separate. Doing otherwise defeats the entire purpose of an alarm. Regards, Larry Z