Home networking.
I'll be stuck on my mother's laptop a while yet, it seems. Full explanation can wait a little longer. But today I worked on getting a home network set up, mostly to work on my files more conveniently off the PC in my room. Vista doesn't like to interact with XP, though, as stupid as that is. And Norton's bullshit firewall doesn't like it either. But thanks to CNET's forums, I managed to piece together the answers. I can now access my files from this laptop without flash disk mediation. There may be too many distractions (read: people) to really work on my novels for some weeks yet, but maybe I can get some more stuff done on Soulthieves/SouthLab, at least.