I bought a brand new Compaq before Christmas with more specs than that laptop for $380 at Wal-Mart. It was a limited supply - stand in line - kind of buy - but well worth it. Laptops are certainly spendy though - You could probably get a desktop with more bells and whistles for the same price.

Unless you are paying for the tunes - you may end up with a huge fine. It has been in the news recently. A Minnesota woman, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, was fined 1.92 million dollars for sharing 24 songs in June. Joel Tenenbaum was fined 675,000 on Friday for downloading and sharing 30 songs. Boy - I just don't think it is worth it - not to mention the problems you can run into - like RC described. If you have paid a fee to Limewire and think you are in the clear to d/l music without paying per song - YOU ARE NOT!! YOu have paid a support fee - to Limewire. You really were ripped off. You are still illegally d/l songs. iTunes works great for the iPod - but not for other types of MP3 players. I only use an iPod now - so I am happy with iTunes.

Sorry, I've been away a bit. To take your comments in order, Kudzu: Well, I'm glad to know it isn't something MS is doing, but there is really no way someone could have gotten access to my computer, unless they came in as a burglar and left no other signs. We have very few guests, and the layout of the house makes it impossible for anyone to enter the computer room without our knowing it. I'm beginning to lean more and more to your second suggestion, that the files came along with something else I downloaded. I did download a video on YouTube a few days ago, and now a search on the site doesn't bring it up anymore, which is strange. DA: I did click to see when some of the files were created. Several were from 2005 and 2006. Do those dates refer to the time they were "created" on my computer (though I do not think I had bought this computer yet in 2005--too lazy to go hunting for the receipt tonight), or to their original creation on someone else's? If it is when they got onto my computer and I just hadn't checked the All Users folder for such things, I am still left with the puzzle of why some got into my personal regular music folder. However, I usually access My Music through the Start menu, but I had gone through My PC>C:\, etc., when I came across this problem. Can it be that the files were there all along, as Gndms suggested, and I just never happened to notice them? (In that case, I will owe everyone an apology for taking your time, and also feel like the boy who cried wolf--though unintentionally!) So long as nothing sinister is going on, I will be content. RavenCajun: I ran scans as you suggested and all seems well there. However, yesterday I checked the History section of MSE and found this: But it wouldn't have anything to do with the strange files, would it? I am wondering how it "exploits" the computer and whether or not it did any exploiting of mine before it was detected and removed. This is the first time MSE has found anything "severe." Up till now, it has always been just cookies. Didn't find any suspicious log-on activity. RUBotted found nothing, too, but thanks for telling me about it; I have Bookmarked the site for future reference. When I checked the administrative tools and event viewer, there was a great long list of events listed as warnings, dating back to April of 2006, which I am assuming was when I bought the PC. All those "warnings" are scary. Can you tell me what they mean? Should I be doing something about them? Thank you all so much for helping me. Just as a final touch for my peace of mind, I am going to run Kaspersky's scan now.

No worries, everyone has a first time with everything. Some of the below assumes you have a Windows PC, but it's only a little different with a Mac. Just like photos, or documents, or other program data, music on a PC, phone, or tablet is in a file. A separate file for each separate item. For all of the above devices, files are put into folders. A folder is like a drawer, and devices have many folders just like a multi-drawered cabinet or a chest has many drawers. Whether buying music from the iTunes store, or Amazon, or whatever, the program that's used (like itunes or Amazon download manager) puts the music files into a specific folder. These programs have a setting that can be changed to put them elsewhere. I always recommend people put files they will access later into a high level folder on their PCs, like a subdirectory of the root directory (Like by creating a folder called C:\Music) so that the contents is easiest to access from Explorer without having to remember a long chain of subdirectories. Whether you have a PC or a Mac, by using iTunes and the iTunes store, the software can find music on your PC. Sometimes, you need to tell it to look. Once in your iTunes library, it can be transfered to your iPhone when it's connected to the PC if it's set to sync media content. (Or maybe it does it automatically unless you tell it not to, I forget which it is). iTunes should also be able to identify music on your PC downloaded from other sources (and certainly that ripped from CDs) and do the same, the same way. For transfers to a Kindle or non-Apple tablet (since an ipad works in the identical way with itunes as do iphones), you'll get your answer by a search like this: Copy transfer music files to Kindle Fire