Again, I wouldn't know, but I seem to recall that others on this forum some time ago gave IE a bucketting and suggested Chrome was much better. As long as this thing finally gets into stride and works as quickly as it is at present, who's complaining?
He suggested that the two ports at the rear of the pc were to accommodate a wifi aerial and that I should connect one if I had it. I did and it appears to have done something positive.
He didn't suggest that by not having them I was prone to unwanted downloads. The problem was that the boot up and download times had become so slow that ads such as the sponsor ads on this site were dragging so long that it took minutes for me to actually do anything on this site.
What I liked was that his advice was easy to follow and he demonstrated how well the machine worked when connected to a decent internet connection. We discussed the problems with poor reception in my area from Optus and the other IP's and, after I asked whether an external aerial, such as the Optus dongle allows for, would improve the reception, he suggested that I use the two ports already provided on the pc if I had the aerial.
Basically, I've been relying on the capacity of the Optus dongle to act as the antenna, in an area with weak reception. It's only in recent weeks that it had become so bad - for the past four years I've had the connection, it has varied between poor during peak periods (you can really tell when the schoolkids get home and start playing with their friggin' i-pads) and good during the early hours of the morning.
As I said, I'm a computer numpty, but my limited knowledge has increased somewhat today. I suspect none of you out there would have had these problems because you would have known what to do from the start.