Two steps forward & one step back

It's a case of two steps forward, and one step back at the moment, but the main thing is I'm moving in the right direction. The good news - the two steps forward, is my desktop has been repaired, and is now back up and running, faster and more efficiently than it was before it gave up the ghost, and crashed. It's a while ago now, but looking back that incident occurred around Easter time, and was the result of a regular Windows update that failed to install. I could still use the machine, but I wasn't able to get online - something to do with two critical "drivers" that had failed. I left it for a while, and switched to using the neat, little laptop PC, that I originally purchased to take on holiday with me. That didn't work particularly well, due to difficulties of connecting to the internet, whilst at sea, although I did use the device for typing up articles in Notepad - a rather basic, but quite handy word-processing app. I'm using it at the moment, but that's for later.I asked a…