F has a little Acer travelmate tablet PC that we bought for her when she went off to college. We had planned to get her a reasonably modest laptop, and then her nice academic scholarships were such that we were able to spend a bit more money and get what she wanted.

And she loves her little computer, but occasionally it gives her fits. It started dropping out letters, and the tablet function stopped working, and we arranged to send it in for repair; but then in the meantime it occurred to me to ask if she'd updated all her virus things and run checkdisk.

Here's an excerpt from her email:

I just completed the checkdisk thing... last night I had to wrestle with all the other things I run, trying to get them updated. Spybot insisted on downloading and installing the new edition of it, and I couldn't make it not, so I was like whatever (there's some grammar for you) and let it and waited three years for it to install itself, but then it was like REBOOT and I was like NO and then I was like FINE WHATEVER and I rebooted and it was like HEY I HAVE TO INSTALL MYSELF NOW and I was like NO YOU DON'T GO AWAY. So I ran the old version of spybot and I guess it worked fine. It took deep into the night, but it didn't find any problems. Ask Daddy should I reinstall the new Spybot or just keep using the old one? Also, ask him what is ad-watch? It appeared on my desktop along with the new adaware.

anyhow, I'm writing this email to test that the typing works, which it appears to do. I have not tested writing on the screen.

oh- the new spybot calls itself spybotsd152. ask daddy what that is as well. I am confused.

Poor F. Here is what we had in my day: