Thanks for the warm welcomes Pastor Roger and blackeyedpeas!!!

And thanks for the information.  Pastor Roger, I did'nt know you could change the default for everything; I saw that under add/remove programs but I never mess with my computers guts unless I know what I'm doing.  And blackeyedpeas, I won't delete anythng.  And I too have heard that removing IE causes HUGE problems!!!  And when they took my old cpu, they put the hard drive into this one so I have two, even if they are only 15gig a piece.

Things are just warming up but it's 12:22pm here and I've been going since 7am.  It's past my bedtime but I'll be back .

 

I have been reading this thread and I do know about these 'open source' things and yes, I would like tohave more security and less crashes by getting rid of ms.  The thing that always puzzled me about them is, if you download all the open sourceware to use but you still have msie, outook and the others; what's the point???  You just further fill up your hard drive and when you try to go to a webpage your machine uses the default ie anyway.

Is it safe to delete the ms stuff without having a backup disk???  An organization gave me a recycled cpu with win2000, msoffice 2000 and no backup disks.  I am afraid this one will crash and I will lose everything that's not backed up but I'm stuck with no money and a cd burner that quit working a few months back.

I strayed from my questions but why have duplicates of everything, and how can you/can you safely get rid of some of the default ms stuff???