Thanks, I knew that there probably had to be a better way. And that buffistas would know it.

I use AVG.

For anti-spyware, I use both Ad-Aware and SpyBot Search&Destroy.

So, should I uninstall the McAfee stuff before downloading AVG? or just leave it sitting there?

I'd uninstall it. No point in having duplicate stuff cluttering up your hard drive.

I bought a new PC yesterday with Vista on it. Judging the OS by itself--it's okay, I guess. But damn, it hates playing nice with other stuff else I have. I haven't encountered this big a problem with compatibility in a Windows upgrade for a while.

Even though I've spent hours and hours configuring it so far, and that I will lose certain pre-installed apps, I'm tempted to go back to XP just so I can have my software back again. I can't find Vista-ready versions of all of it, stuff I've already paid good money for.

Very irritating. I'd hoped the annoyances would be minimised by it being an whole new install, but I'm faced with obstacles as diverse as my U3 thumb drive not working, as well as my Nikon software.

ita, that seems to be exactly why there's still so much Vista hate. I actually have an install, and refuse to use it, except on a secondary or backup computer, which I do not have at the moment. I strongly recommend reverting to XP, because I think you'll have a nice long wait to be able to use most of the things that aren't playing nice with Vista. If they ever even work with Vista.

This is the second machine I've bought that came with Vista. I overwrote the first one with Ubuntu, but thought I'd give this one a chance since it was going to be a Windows box after all. I seem to recall that there should be a way to downgrade for free, but I'm fuzzy on all the details.

[link]

Ccleaner - cleans out internet activity files, etc.

AVG highly recommended. Brenda m, I know it's absolutely none of my business... but I recommend you invest half an hour installing AVG at some point. It's free. If you're using Windows and you haven't got any anti-virus software installed, you've probably already got something on there. Which isn't a problem, but if you shop online it can be troublesome.

Me, I use a Mac at home, so nothing, and Ubuntu on a laptop, so nothing. At work we use Sophos Enterprise Console.

On an unrelated note, there's a new long term support version of Ubuntu due this month. I've had a play with the latest beta - it's really cool. It installs from Windows using some trickery, and will happily dual boot. No repartitioning needed. You can uninstall it from Windows, too, to get rid of it.

I should note that I had to get rid of AVG a couple of years ago because it was interfering with bittorrent. I don't torrent now, so I'm thinking of returning to AVG. McAfee is such a drain on my computer's resources that I have to get rid of it.