Thanks again everyone... I'll mess about with this a bit more!
I finally managed to get my Virgin email account up and running on Windows Live Mail, so i was pretty happy about that.
Today i tried to install my printer software and got a message saying that it's not compatible with the operating system (it's only a year old, but obviously that was pre-Windows 7). So I'm pretty hacked off that I am now going to have to buy a new printer.
What other little 'surprises' am i in store for?
I'm really starting to hate this computer...