Welcome to the homeowners club. It's a lot of work, but IMHO it's totally worth having your own patch of dirt. Now about trees, here are my recommendations: For shade, Sissoo (dahlbergia sissoo) also known as Indian Rosewood is hard to beat. Grows fast, not messy, great shade, can deal with the heat and isn't all that fussy about water either. I planted one exactly one year ago. My budget is tiny so I got a tiny one ($17 for a 5ft tall skinny (not even half inch thick) whip from Lowes. One year later, that tree is about 14 ft tall and over 2 more like 3 inches around at the base. Mesquite is also good for shade but it has very thirsty roots that compete with everything else for water. Yes they can take a drought, but the roots will make sure that tree has a monopoly on whatever water there is left in the soil around it so don't plant it too close to the house and other trees. For fruit, I'd go with figs. They're actually awesome for shade too if you let them get bigger. I have a Black Mission fig and a Turkey Brown fig, they're still tiny but both of them started fruiting after just a little more than one year in the ground. A pomegranate tree is definitelly in my plans and I'd recommend it. I'd plant several grape vines to screen that porch especially if it is on the north or east side. And then there's citrus trees. I have an improved Meyer lemon and also a Lisbon Lemon. Both fruiting after 1 yr. $29 at Baker's nursery. Also Rio Red grapefruit and Trovita orange. If you're into exotic fruits, I have a quince tree, which can take the sun here once it matures, but last summer I failed to paint it and it sunburned badly. It's still alive, I'm hoping it will come back, the flowers are beautiful and the fruit fragrant. There you go, that's my 2c. and I'd also like to say what not to get: African Sumac! I had 7 of them when I bought the property. They can be nice looking trees, but they're a lot of work, need a lot of pruning and make a whole lot of mess and they reseed themselves all over like weeds.

For what it's worth, I haven't been able to update my Adaware software for about a month. After about 5% of the download, the connection fails. A problem on their end might be corrupting your download. Admittedly, since I've been using the same computer for years and have never had trouble downloading updates when I open the program, I assume it's them and not me, and haven't looked into it. Surprised though that it hasn't been corrected.

I agree with Raven here, I would not be taking a Celeron computer in for repair. That might well cost half the price of a new computer. You don't have a friend, neighbour or relative who might loan you their Windows XP CD? Explain to them that you do not need the license number as your license sticker on the side of the computer case is the one you would enter as you install XP. That sticker number is tied to the motherboard in your computer. (I suspect that if you have XP Home then you would need an XP Home CD) Recovery disks are bought at the time of the computer purchase. Or this is more often just a separate partition on your hard drive and the buyer should create a set of recovery disks. This includes all the 'free' extras the computer maker adds on. The XP CD is just that, a copy of Windows XP with nothing added As a side note you may want to suggest to Dad that he creates a set of recovery disks for his machine in case he runs into problems too at some future point.

While it's a good idea not to run windows with administrator rights while browsing the web because it just makes it easier for malware to secretly dowload and install, unfortunately, I believe running as a limited user will not permit some windows updates to install. So when you tried to install windows updates, was it as administrator or limited user? Below is a support page from Microsoft. You also may want to make sure you are virus free. There are many online scans available that you can run without going through the bother of installing as evidenced by this article: http://blogs.computerworld.com/battling_antivirus_programs Also, you may want to run an online scan at secunia to see if you have all patches needed for installed applications: http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/online/ Here is a link that might be useful: Microsoft support page regarding updates not installing