re Rowal5555, the xp crash, all I can say is I started years ago with wins 95, green as the green grass of Ireland, sat at it and fumbled my way through, was terrified I would break something, but I perservered and looked through all files etc., in this marvellous machine what an experience....taught myself and since then I have upgraded to wins xp and a new puter,plus a laptop, I have never ever had a crash.. touch wood, in the old days got the dreaded blue screen of death but nothing ever happened, I use AVG, & Avast on the other computer plus Ad aware, Mailwasher, and never ever ever open something I don't know, never ever click anything I don't know, & have found I can reset back if something goes awry, which is good, so far so good, use Gmail.com plus local service, no probs, also Skype, free calls around the World, hey thats fantastic!I dearly love my computer and it's window to the world..amazing stuff! have had Yahoo messinger & mail etc., but I find Yahoo a bit intrusive, and a massive amount of spam, so much I had to close one mail box..depends on what you like...as I have 8 grandchildren in Australia I joined Bebo, a closed account so only my friends and family can access it, and it really marvellous for keeping in touch, you can upload photos and blog yeah!! great stuff!!! Also download Google Earth, thats totally but totally fabulous, you can go anywhere in the World and check friends, cities, genealogy re ancestors where they lived, its totally amazing! also your own town,street , and house, or if you are buying a new home good to suss out the neighbourhood, go get it!

Good for you alienzone, nice to know someone else out there loves their computers!

oh I do, I do Cookybaby!

Hi Alienzone88

I am pretty much the same. Started off with an old Win98SE machine and graduated to an HP Pavilion and a couple of laptops.
I reckon that if your machine never fails, you learn nothing. When it does, it is either fork out hard cash or fix it yourself.
I know a lot of people do not like Vista, and I must say that I prefer XP myself, but Vista does know how to look after itself. Yesterday I rebooted a laptop and it crashed with a BSOD. I got it going again with Last Known Good Configuration, but about 8 hours later a message popped up telling me where to go and what to update so you can't argue with that. Will be interesting to see Windows 7.
Happy computing all.
Cheers, Rob