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

PolarPrincess - If you have a USB port, buy an external hard drive that connects to the USB port and copy ALL of your data (pictures and other personal files) to it. Then your data is safe and you can clean up the rest of the system. If not, burn them to CD for safety. THEN: 1 - Empty the Trash 2 - Search for files on the entire system, using this search pattern" *.bak (those are temporary files that can be deleted) 3 - Delete all of those files. 4 - Empty the trash again. 5 - Search for all *.tmp files and delete them 6 - Empty the trash again. 7 - Run the Windows XP "check disk" utility as described here: http://www.updatexp.com/windows-xp-chkdsk.html It may take quite a while ... 8 - Then try running the defragmentation program.

After you have run AVast and let it do it's thing please go and get malwarebytes antimalware and follow these direction. Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware Please download Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware to your desktop. * Double-click mbam-setup.exe and follow the prompts to install the program. * At the end, be sure a checkmark is placed next to Update Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware and Launch Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware, then click Finish. * If an update is found, it will download and install the latest version. * Once the program has loaded, select Perform full scan, then click Scan. * When the scan is complete, click OK, then Show Results to view the results. * Be sure that everything is checked, and click Remove Selected. * When completed, a log will open in Notepad. Please save it to a convenient location. The log can also be found here: C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\Malwarebytes\Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware\Logs\log-date.txt * Please post contents of that file in your next reply. Then we can tell what next.

I use Firefox daily and never had this problem, I would not quickly attribute it to Firefox. But make sure you have the latest updated version of Firefox! Try clearing the cache on Firefox which should be done regularly anyway. Try Right clicking on the back arrow, that will give you a drop down list of the previous pages you visited, click here on the first selection which should be exactly the same as just hitting the back button once. If this works I think you might have a problem with the actual back button. Do you have any problems with just using the cursor and using it to click on the back arrow on Firefox? I don't think I have ever used the back button on my pc keyboard to go back to the previous page, I strictly use the mouse cursor, my mouse actually has a specific go back button on it but I rarely use it.