Ron writes: Hi, you helped me a great deal before and am in a fix. I was on vacation for 6 months and a friend started my Focus to keep the battery charged. That was fine but second time it started ran about 15 seconds and shut off. I thought perhaps he had run it out of gas, nope I put 4 gallons in and recharged battery and same thing happened to me: ran 15 seconds and stopped. It just cranks, does not start. Can I reprogram the chip? Or am I screwed?

Thanks, Ron

My reply:

One of my keys just lost its association with the car one day, and it doesn't act like this. The red blinking light above the hazard light button blinks fast and the car will refuse to crank. Additionally, the odometer and trip meter show all dashes ( - - - - )

I'm not entirely sure what's wrong, but it sounds like it's not getting fuel. Check the inertia switch in the passenger footwell. Pop off the little plastic cover and press the button. If that isn't the problem, it sounds like it could be the fuel filter to me. The last time I did this, it was only $7 in parts. It's a cheap thing to try. Let me know if that works. If not, there are some other things you can try, but let's go for the cheapest, easiest thing first.

When I completely re-wrote FocusHacks, one thing really holding me back was the search capability. The previous search functionality caused all kinds of problems with Google and other search engines. I decided to launch the site last month without the integrated search feature. Tonight, I finally got it working again. It works the way I like it to, and I expect that it will work for you just as well as it did before.

Go ahead. Kick the tires and use the search box in the navigation pane on the left side of the site. You can search by title only (default) or through the whole text of all the hacks in the database. Let me know if you encounter any problems with it.