Advice for After Rescue & Recovery

[pderas]

My Thinkpad R52 (185928U) was running slooow since I put it online in April for the first time, loading McAfee, Quickbooks and TurboTax.

I deleted Quickbooks and Turbotax, and kept battling with what was (I think) a botched McAfee installation.

Here's the weird thing that put me over the edge and made my decision to run Rescue & Recovery to restore the machine to factory original:

The display turned 90 degrees on me!

I got a stiff neck just getting stuff backed up enough to run R&R.

Anyway, now here I am with this "virgin" (XP-Pro with SP2) machine that I need to get on the Internet.

I need to update from Lenovo, WinXP-PRO from Microsoft, and install McAfee.

Lenovo I can do by downloading files to my desktop and copying them to media (Thanks Lenovo!).

But I am concerned about connecting this machine to the Internet without antivirus and XP updates.

Which do you suggest I do first?

[lead_org Microsoft MVP Contributor]

instead of McAfee, i will suggest Avast Home which is free and does much better than Norton and McAfee and AVG free that i have used. 

I will suggest that you download anti virus first (50 mb at most), and then do updates (there are lots of updates that you will require)...  

[pderas]

My problem turned out to be remnants of Norton Antivirus.