Trials & tribulations - Does Your Computer Ever Slow You Down?

I"ve had loads of problems with computers lately. First we had a power cut while the computer was on which was a few weeks ago, only a small one mind (less than 1 sec) It came back on but the flat monitor screen had gone funny, the screen had a blank space on the left-hand side & it had stretched out to the right so only half the screen was showing. The picture was also fuzzy. I rang my brother & he reckoned it was the monitor so I changed it for an old bulky style one and hey presto - it worked, Anyway, it was OK for about a week when I unintentionally downloaded something - cant remember what. My security firewall warned me but it was too late - I"d downloaded spy ware, a virus, Trojan horses etc (I dont think I would want to ride one, ha ha!) It was bad cause it wasn"t even my PC that I was using. As a result, I couldn"t access the Internet, the McKee virus killer that was installed was out of date so although it scanned the system & picked up all the malicious software etc, It couldn"t eradicate them. so I jaunted down to PC World and bought Spy Doctor. The ticket said just under a fiver but it turned out to be nearly half price, great! so I got it home & it got rid of most of the malicious stuff apart from one virus. It still wouldn"t log on the Internet so I gave up and used my laptop instead. I had quite a few probs. with that as well. First Internet explorer kept crashing, so I updated it to the very latest update, Internet explorer 8 beta. Because of my ignorance, I didn"t know what "beta" meant - I thought it would work like a dream but it was rubbish. It was slow & kept crashing. I found out that I needed a registry cleaner - so back to PC World and discovered "WinCleaner Complete PC Care" which turned to be a bargain - listed at 20 notes, it also turned out to be half price. I got that home and ran it - it did a great job, it even has a virus killer (for one PC only) included which I can use on the affected machine. although things loaded up faster, the dreaded internet Explorer 8 still played up. I then cleaned my system using the seperate features on the PC care kit (I"d used the one click auto cleaner before and things worked even better. Still, explorer 8 wasn"t right. so I gave up and installed explorer 7 and Eureka! it now runs perfectly. I later found out that "beta" means it"s a test version for developers and not the general public - aghh! I wish I"d known that before it would"ve saved no end of time.