Any computer can be considered unworthy by someone, because a lot of it is nebulous and personal taste. For example, for my previous computer purchase, I bought a cheapie laptop because I had all the bells and whistles I needed at work so the last thing I wanted to do at home was use a computer. So I just bought something for e-mail and online shopping at home. THEN, I lost my job. Now I work from home a ton, and my DVD player that was attached to my TV went out and I can't afford a new one so I am using my laptop for watching movies, which I also do a ton more since I replaced expensive cable that I didn't care much for with Netflix. I use this as an example because even though you maybe bought a little more than you think you need, you never know where your life will take your or where technology will take us in the future. I know I paid 100 dollars more for getting a new Sony laptop, with the sole reason being I didn't have to struggle with the keyboard the way I did with all the other ones I tried, and I know I will be typing a ton in graduate school. So I have some remores at paying 100 more for a computer that is not that much better than the cheaper ones, but I KNOW I will be thanking myself later when I am knee deep in my doctoral disseration and am spending hours on it. It's very hard to know how to parcel out financial priorities in these difficult times, and THAT I DO think is worth discussing on a forum. I say, if you CAN, pay a little more to get a little more which will stand you in good stead for the future. But other people will say, get the minimum and live with it. Neither school is right or wrong. But once you have decided, own your decision and don't look back, IMHO. Because you are just going to get conflicting advice from the two camps til the cows come home. If you made what YOU thought was a good decision, stand by it. . . . Of course that is just my opinion, lol!

PROGESS ! Ok, have run Malwarebyte - 0 threats detected. Ran Superspyware scan and found 231 seemingly harmless adware tracking cookies and 1 critical threat. Seems a Rogue.agent was lurking. I quarantined and removed all 232 and rebooted. YEA me ! Next, I was going to run the Ccleaner, but had questions (of course), so I'm back to ask: At the bottom of the cleaner page are two options ~ 1 says ANALYZE the second says RUN CLEANER. When I clicked on the latter I warned me that a ton of stuff was about to be pushed of a cliff, so I left it and clicked on ANALYZE. From there, I saw a list of just what was about to be deleted and thus my concern and question: Is it really alright to delete the following: 159 files - windows explorer - recent documents 16,017 files - temporary internet 8,826 files - System temporary 50 files - applications - office 2007 48 files - applications - office xp 513 files - utilities - AVG 2012 Some other things seemed to be pretty huge, but with few files (Windows Explorer Thumbnail Cache - 1,794,021,021 KB -5 files). I'm sure this all seems like small potatoes to you guys, but because I don't understand a lot of what I'm seeing and am just learning what to clean up on my PC,these choices seem daunting. Will put off the Cclean until I get the go ahead. Many thanks. I'm truly beginning to feel empowered !

yes and it is often very easy to turn it off by mistake. on my netbook it is a little slider button at the very front edge right where I often grab it and in doing so slide it to off. Look for the little symbol that looks like a satelite dish sort of. Also depending on how old it is it may not have a wireless connection card in it which you can take care of easily. Tell us the model of the laptop. Have you hooked it up to your connection using a wire to make sure you can connect that way and it is not some other problem? If not do that right away. and give us more info on the type of connections you have and the specs on the laptop including the OS.

Snidely - good point about not removing things if they're not causing trouble - lest they turn out to have been needed. So I have left some things that I have no idea about. I did delete Dell Stage - bc. it's a real pain - gets in the way all the time (my daughter who's had this on her laptop for 2 years confirmed that it's just in the way). I did all the microsoft updates, ran a few antivirus, got rid of what I want to get rid of, and it's mostly good to go. Here's the trouble that remains: I can't get the printer working. It's a Canon Pixma MX850 - on the home network. I did not want to install the Canon disk bc. it has a ton of it's own bloatware. So I went to Canon and downloaded the driver - as well as the IJ utility software (I think that helps the computer find a printer on the network). Went to devices and printers, added the printer and made it the default printer. It shows up in printers and devices, but when I go to print something, it fails. Troubleshooting says the test page didn't print bc. something else is in the queue. But there is nothing else in the queue. I opened the queue from my pain desktop (that's connected to the printer) - and there's no documents in the queue. Went to the printer queue on DH's lapto; - it also shows nothing in the queue. I can print from other computers. Don't know what else to do. And I just remembered that I did not see Java. It didnt come up as needing updating when I ran the Secunia scan. I am not sure which programs need it, but can imagine my husband being stumped if he tries to do something that needs Java and asks him to install. I'd like to install it for him. Got to remember that. I also have a question about Microsoft Security Essentials. Twice now it found something bad - and I selected to remove the couple of files. Does this AV just run in the background or do I also need to run scans? Thank you. Lynn.