0 to 20 in 12 hours

I bought a new computer this morning, brought it home, and had it up and running by 9:30. This evening at 9:30 I installed and ran Spybot-S&D. It found and removed 20 problems.

There are many things that would make the world a better place by being this efficient. Adbots are not one of them.

The Moral of the Story

(But I'll spare you the week-long story.)

Windows Vista will not connect your laptop to the Internet unless you have some kind of Norton anti-virus software installed. You don't even have to have an active subscription--you just have to have it installed or you will get nothing but that cursed Local Access Only message until you do. McAfee doesn't work; it must be Norton. There is no way around this. Not even plugging directly into the router or DSL modem with an ethernet cable will work.

This is assuming, of course, that the moral of my story can be generalized to all Vista-running laptop owners in the world. I assume that's a safe assumption.

Things My Computer Can't Do Lately Without Considerable (and Time-Consuming) Effort

• Switch back and forth between Firefox and Windows Media Player
• Play movies
• Figure out what the next song in the rotation will be
• Open PDFs
• Close any application
  
• Open Word documents
• Open Excel documents
• Pretty much anything with Office 2007
• Bake chocolate chip cookies

Attn computer-savvy folks: Will buying more RAM solve all these problems and more?