When I was home at Christmas, I remember doing a "tune-up" of my dad's computer system. He had a number of software barnacles that had attached themselves to his system. On the latest systems with obscene amounts of processor horsepower these may not be noticeable. On low end systems these little "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" programs running in the background chip away at your limited memory and processor resources and make your system seem even more sluggish. The BBC is running an article entitled "The spy in your computer" which discusses the topic a bit. My favorite line from the article: "The easiest way to avoid parasite programs, he says, is to stop using Internet Explorer (IE) because it is targeted by many of the adware and spyware companies."
Both at home and at work I run IE's main competitor, Mozilla. A year or two ago Mozilla looked like it wouldn't be able to compete with IE. It was falling behind schedule since a decision was made a few years ago to start with a "clean slate" which put things behind. In the end the open source community really pulled it off. Mozilla runs on PCs, Unix, and Apple computers with the same codebase. That's more than you can say about IE. Mozilla also tends to lean towards a more accurate rendering of web standards than IE. I've often done tweaks to BilikFamily.com at home only to have to patch them again the next morning when I get to work and find out Microsoft didn't render something in the standard way but took their own "interpretation" (ahem).
It's funny that a year ago I didn't think it was seriously possible to run a computer that didn't have some Microsoft software running on it. For the past year I've done it. I don't think that highly of Steve Jobs (head of Apple), but I don't consider him as pathologically monopolistic as Bill Gates. Plus, on the geeky scale, it's neat to have a unix desktop that can run Winnie the Pooh while simultaneously running a Perl based Apache web server.
Michelle had a good appointment with her doctor today. The baby is doing well. No major issues of concern.