Checking my email is a ritual that borders on the obsessive for me. To boot, all of the blogs I read are fed through my email programme, which happens to be Mozilla Thunderbird.

At first, I loved it. Then it seemed to get slower and slower and began dragging the whole computer down into the mire with it. Firefox, which had previously been just fine, transmogrified into a sloth and hand in hand, slug and sloth slowed a relatively speedy machine down to a crawl.

I let this go on for waaaayyy too long, as I had just finished configuring everything and was loathe to lose settings and personalisation. Finally, after waiting for three and a half minutes for Firefox to close, I tackled the problem. Turns out that Thunderbird didn’t *upgrade* when it told me it had new upgrades and would I pretty please click on the nice link now thank you. It reinstalled. Without uninstalling the previous version. So the reason poor computer was struggling was that it was trying to simultaneously run two versions of the same program. Sounds like a computer version of hell…..

Anyway, uninstalled both. Reinstalled. Now running like a dream. Apart from that little glitch (which I should have dealt with earlier, but avoided), Thunderbird is super.