>>I had "fun" even finding x64 Virus scanning,
>>
>>FWIW, I use MicroTrend (one of the better ones when using Windows Server '08 on a standalone machine
>
>The first thing I did when I bought my mom her laptop was to remove Trend Micro and install AVG.

Seconded. I have been very happy with AVG. I installed it after a virus-related catastrophe a year and a half ago (Symantec let that one through) and have had no incidents since.

You may remember that I got a little paranoid on the subject of backup and security after that incident, which resulted in a good deal of lost data. Here is what I am doing now for backup:

1. Backup4All runs automatically every night to create an incremental backup to an external USB drive. Every month or so I manually take a new full backup.

2. ShadowProtect, which is similar to Backup4All, creates incremental backups every noon to a different external USB drive.

3. Ghost creates a full image twice a week to the first USB drive.

4. Carbonite, an online backup service ($50/year), continuously backs up modified files to some remote location. That's my ace in the hole.

I feel fairly safe ;-)

One interesting wrinkle here is how the second external drive became available. It used to be attached to the Mac and was the destination of the Mac's automatic Time Machine backup program. Now the Mac is in Emily's room and I realized it doesn't need to be backed up any more. The main reason it was there before was to protect my music library (> 70 gig), which was created by laboriously recording 700 or 800 CDs. I sure didn't want to do that again. I copied the iTunes library to my main machine (PC) and will add to it here going forward. Emily doesn't need her computer backed up. Almost everything she does is online. The only local documents she has are pictures and homework assignments, which she manually copies to a USB stick. Anyone who doesn't think cloud computing is coming only has to watch how younger users already use their computers.