"Some time later, dad got a notice from the copyright holder
with an offer to settle out of court for damages of $4000/song.
It wasn't malware. It was something the kid agreed to without
reading the fine print or considering the fallout. "

My sister just got a laptop with Wimdows 8 for $300. Cheap but it works. Much as I hate to say it you might want 8, it's liable to have better controls.

About P2P, kids are not careful enough. The network is mined pretty heavily.. Apparently the RIAA is polluting it with bad files. Some arer quite worrsome actually. One has a female voice saying "This is an illegal download, go to something dot com to redownload the file. I wouldn't go there but I bet it's not a nice site and even if you do download the file there it's probably the same audio file that says it's an illegal download.

I can't seem to find YTD 3.9 anymore. I have it on one PC and it works well downloading most of what yuo can get on youtube or a couple other sites. I DLed it for my laptop and it tunred out to be 3.4, and it fails alot of downloads.

Dealing with t he shared folder when using P2P is important. What I do is to only leave the really hard to get files in there. The RIAA is looking for new stuff chiefly. I'd like them to threaten me for oldies because I will not settle even if I have to represent myself. I want to know where is my check from whoever bought these oldies out of public domain. I'm part of the publis, where's my money ?

Basically, when the file has plent of sources and comes quick, remove it. Leave the stuff in there that took a month to get, oldies and rare stuff.

Anyway, when it comes to getting the history, there is spyware available. I know it sounds bad but spyware is good when you're the one doing the spying. In fact it is possible your ISP has one you could maybe get for free. They don't want to be guilty of pandering abscenity to minors.

My little horror story had to do with those 900 numbers. I was shacked up a little while with a hillbilly broad named Louise. From Alabama. Left me a $300 phone bill. I didn't pay it, just the normal phone charges so eventually they called collecting. We told them she was under 18 and the silence was deafening. Nothing happened to my credit either, I could buy a new car on a credit card so they didn't do anyting there either. Suing me would be admitting that they pandered.