[LHN91]

The A6 would be at best a side-grade. It's outperformed at stock by a Core2Quad Q6600.

If you're going to update, despite my own desire to support the underdog I'd still pick at least a haswell Pentium on a basic board, it'd vastly outperform the A6.

[jr2]

Uninstalling Norton when it has screwed up your system won't usually fix things.  You have to use the Norton Removal Tool (yes, they had to release a tool to pry its tentacles out of your system).

https://support.norton.com/sp/en/us/home/current/solutions/kb20080710133834EN_EndUserProfile_en_us

[Trivial Psychic]

I have recruited the assistance of my Brother-in-law, who's a PC-Whiz and one who is well acquainted with invasive and malicious software.  He indicates that he will likely be able to recover my system without the proposed hardware upgrade.  While the idea of a machine full of new hardware is appealing, I would rather postpone such an upgrade for another time and have a fully restored system and save that money for another day... even if it isn't my money.

[Trivial Psychic]

Double-Post.

With the assistance of my Brother-In-Law, we performed a wipe of my 160GB drive, removed the partitions, and installed a fresh copy of Windows.  I'm still in the process or getting my settings back to what they were, and I can't seem to find the program I was using for email before and Thunderbird is somewhat troublesome.  I even managed to import my old bookmarks from Waterfox into Firefox-64bit.  Also, as suggested, I have installed Avast as my primary anti-virus software.

[jr2]

If you might be able to recognize it by name, you could look at the list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_email_clients

[Trivial Psychic]

Good job!  Windows Live Mail, which I need to download Windows Essentials to get.  Thanks!

[jr2]

Glad to help.

If you have trouble getting .net Framework 3.5 (which includes 2.0 and the necessary 3.0 for Essentials), there's a write-up here.  (Basically, under "turn Windows features on/off", install it)

[Trivial Psychic]

I found it.  Its all set up.  Thanks.

[FlamingCobra]

I haven't used Avast! Free antivirus yet. However, since my hard drive failed about a week ago I have been using the free version of Avira and it's doing a very good job. Does anyone else have experience with Avira?