Best Friends: New and Old

My best friend, my husband, has recently become a little jealous about the time I spend with my laptop. Part of that time has been spent on "work" as an Etsy seller, but a lot more of that time was spent trying to deal with a slow outdated computer and troubleshoot problems related to having an almost overloaded hard drive. So for Christmas he got me a new laptop! Isn't it lovely? It came with a printer too, I haven't hooked it up yet. Click the image to meet my new best friend:It has a lot more memory and is faster than my old one. It runs with Windows Vista which I haven't used yet so I'm slowly figuring out the differences between Vista and XP. This laptop has a lot of features I've never had, like a built in web cam, so I'll be spending some time in the near future learning how to use them!
Now the kids are fighting over who will claim the old laptop; little do they know that neither of them will have it for their own. We think the family computer should be out in the open where the sites they visit can be easily monitored. Luckily they are too young for now to be on MySpace or on chat sites. The worst they've seen so far has been YouTube which can show you things you don't expect even when doing an innocent search. Our oldest (10) uses it occasionally for homework, either for research or word processing. Our youngest (nearly 7) likes Webkinz and a few PC games she has on disk. I dread the day that we have to worry about them connecting to the sinister outside world! I wish they could remain innocent just a little bit longer. But then again, our oldest starts middle school next year so he'll get more of a real world experience soon enough. In our part of the county, the middle and high schoolers share the buses, so he'll be a 6th grader riding with kids through 12th grade. I'm hoping they are allowed to bring iPods on the bus so he can listen to music instead of listening to the older kids' chatter! Any advice?