Give me your old computer, or give it to someone you trust , i wouldnt risk giving a hard drive to the trash without a hammer. I have been using Avast on Vista laptop here as it seems to be the most popular right now... but that could change fast with a new version. Unless you live in a multifamily building its seriously doubtful anyone will want to steal your wifi connection and the connections with your bank and such will be highly encrypted,, no one will be cracking into that quickly in the short amount of time you're going to be using it. Follow proper security recomendations and you'll be fine. New solo browser window for your banking or other secure financials... highly recommended if you have wifi or cable network of any kind ;) And close it and clear cache when youre done,,, unless youre positive all youre sharing is blocked. Public hotspots ,,, Vista has a special public place security feature you can use... great for single stand alone non networked computers in the home too. Wifi is cool and 'nearly' totally secure - it would be unusual for someone to gain access to yours unless you have a crook for a neighbor or a stupid kid. ,, im fixing to unsecure mine now for a few days... if I see someone using it ,, I'll block them if its not one of my freindly neighbors accidentally connected. Not a big deal to me if I know the user. But easily secured so youre the only one that has access without some hacking. Hacking into wifi is a serious crime in most communities. my two pennies anyways.... if you dont have wifi now call your isp before running out and buying something,, they maybe will sell you something cheap,, or give it to you and then support it too if you need help setting it up.

The Toshiba A135 received a Very Good rating from cnet. Cnet doesn't give very many $1000 affordable laptops that high of a rating. I recently bought the A135 2877, I believe is the model, the one with 2 gs of mem. (would recommend 2 gigs minimum for vista, from what I hear. It has a 180g hard drive, actually two seperate hard drives, a 100g plus an 80g. Great for backing up your system. With this much memory and hd space, you could collect a sizeable video and audio library (were talking hundreds of songs and movies). It runs Vista flawlessly. Yes, there are faster systems out there. I would have loved one with the Nvidia graphics card, which would give you a whopping 512m of shared graphics memory. The Intel that comes with the A135 has 256megs, acceptable. For about $1100 at costco online, I thinks it's one of the best deals out there. It was about $300 more than I wanted to spend on a laptop, but I'm just thinking where technology is going today, with streaming video, tv and music becomming more and more prevailant, before too long, anything less that 2 gigs of memory and a harddrive less than 100 gigs will probably be obsolete in the next couple years. I think this will be sufficient for our needs for some years to come. -- john

I agree right now if you can keep your old pc working for you and wait till windows 7 comes out you will be avoiding having to purchase any upgrades. It will be out in about a year. If you have any friends that have pc knowledge likely they could easily help you install a new hard drive and some RAM, these are things I do myself but my first time I was pretty anxious. I also agree that the desktop is generally the best option unless you travel a lot and would need a laptop for that. My sister just asked me the same question and I talked her into a desktop pretty quickly, if you have not used a laptop try asking a friend with one to let you try it out for an hour or so, feel how the keyboard feels, see how you like the touch pad instead of a mouse, etc. If you have any problems seeing also consider the smaller screen of a laptop. I have pretty severe hand problems so using a smaller keyboard would be very difficult. Sitting in a chair with the laptop on your lap would require some type of laptop desk so you do not block the air flow. As stated updating and replacing parts in a laptop is much more difficult. One thing you could definitely do also rather than install a new hard drive in your pc is buy a stand alone usb backup hard drive and move all your thousands of pictures and music and other files and data to that hard drive and free up your hard drive in the pc, if you did that and got rid of any old programs you no longer need, clean out any junk files and folders, empty the recycle bin, defrag the hard drive you may find you have plenty of room on that 80Gig hard drive. I have been seeing some incredible prices lately on usb hard drives so you could easily find a nice size one for around $50, and you could use that stand alone hard drive with any new computer you buy in the future. Plus no one would have to install it for you, you just plug it into your usb port and then you can access it from your pc just like your other hard drive. Add some RAM to what ever belarc says is your limit for that pc or at least 2 gig and I bet you would be surprised. RAM is cheap. I just bought a 1gig stick for one of my computers and it was less than $20 shipped. If your current pc is a desktop I would also highly suggest turning it off unplug it and open the side panel up and clean out all the dust bunnies, that can really affect the performance of a pc. Cleaning the computer and its components ecost has some very good prices right now this search is for under $50 units but it gives you some ideas. well now you have lots of options and ways to go and up to you to make that big decision. Here is a link that might be useful: usb hard drives

Right bookmarks are with the browser so you need to know the browser and preferably the version number. Like Firefox or I E, or Chrome. I use Xmarks that way no matter what browser or device or OS I have my bookmarks easily accessible. It is free and I love it.