Great that you are removing Norton; it's a royal pain and that's being nice. I work in the IT field and me and alot of my co-workers use Microsoft's free Window's Essential anti virus. It's easy to download; it'll check your pc to make sure you get the right version and it's easy to install. I have no problems with it. It's up to you about the trial version of MS office; sometimes it's free for a couple of months and sometimes its not. You'll probably want to have some type of word program and some come with Works installed and its fine. You can get the student version of MS Office at a cheaper price than the regular and unless you are using it for business it's fine. I've gotten it at the Navy Base for yrs until this past yr when Microsoft gave the employees in the IT dept where I work the ability to buy it really cheap. I have two laptops, one regular 17in for when I'm digitizing or working from home and a netbook if I want to take my stuff and not use a large laptop. You can also hook up a monitor to your laptop when at home if you want a larger screen to use.