Ideas Man

That really is an open question, it does kinda depend on what the core requirement is. For home users, I still don't understand why they need pro, except that it's 'better' and Tommy the computer expert down the street has it. 90% of home users do not need anything that pro offers over home, yet still buy pro and then complain it's too expensive (go figure, would you go out and buy a top of the range sports car if all you were ever gonna do is drive down the street every day?). If you're a power user, then I'd pick Pro (I have it, and I actually USE the added functionality provided, not just to have it say 'pro' ). They all have their respective markets, if I wanted to watch telly, I'd have picked MCE, if I wanted to run a web server or any server, then I'd have picked Server 2003. See, need to be more specific.

I read Microsoft said this was because they haven't been signed yet, this is why some obvious applets will prompt for permission.

There's a button in the quick launch bar that does that for you, it looks like a few white windows, atleast it's on mine and it does it. Plus I think it's Ctrl+Space, but I can't confirm, ain't in it ATM.

I'd say you're treading a very fine line continuing to use it, it's crap anyway. Most of the files are fakes anyway, so it really has no major uses anymore.

I recently purchased a new computer too, I looked at SATAII drives, but there is no speed improvement ATM over standard SATA drives from all the tests I saw, so I just stuck with SATA drives. So don't be too concerned if the performance of them isn't too good because it should be on par with SATA, considering it's very very new (Hell, SATA drives originally were the same if not slower than their PATA counterparts when SATA was released).

It's not, you have to specifically tell it you want to use it, otherwise it reverts to Windows Update. To tell it you want to use Microsoft Update, goto http://update.microsoft.com/microsoftupdate and install the ActiveX controls. It will then use this by default.