Comments Elsewhere

All excellent recommendations. You might also add Mozilla Thunderbird, an e-mail client coming out of the same project as Firefox, as a replacement for Outlook Express. Partly because it is more secure, and partly just because it’s by far a better e-mail client—it features excellent spam filtering, good IMAP support, a better interface, etc. (It also, for what it’s worth, features a handy-dandy Atom/RSS newsreader, and happens to be the main way that I keep up with blogs these days…)