Expensive solutions to Skype and other things

Our skype connection at home has not been working for the last 3 months, ever since it updated itself to the newest version. I'd been going nuts trying to sort it out, as the alternative to this is phoning from my mobile (we have no home phone) and spending a months wages in international calls in the space of seconds. We have been gallantly putting up with a six year old computer, which was already slow when we got it, and has been getting slower and slower - the record being 50 minutes from switching it on to being able to do anything at all. So, amid much cursing of technology and searching for blocked ports and God knows what, we discussed, and decided, that now for the first time in our lives we shall buy a new computer. (The previous model was new when we got it, as part of a package from work - presented in order to stop me from spending all day and night writing music on the work computer). So down to the local computer mega store, part with a four figure sum, and return with a 22 inch flat screen monitor, a computer with 100 Gbits of memory (That, I believe, is a lot) and various goodies, like windows Vista. The best bit is that I plugged it all in, and so far it has worked as it should, no messing around, and skype now works again!! The only problem is that I have now discovered the joys of youtube , which in the previous incarnation worked on a stop/go system, but now download in seconds. Ahh, thank you Finnish communications and broadband. On a more serious side, I also have access through the Academy to the Naxos collection, which means that I can listen to as much music as I like, and not have to purchase any more CD's at least for the moment...