Update

They say no news is good news.
They're right.

My ageing and ancient laptop, about a month ago, stopped working on me. I didn't bother to find out how, I assumed it was going to happen sooner or later.
Just two days ago, I gave it a little troubleshooting, and found it turned out to be the mains power adaptor. Now it works. Problem solved.
The downside is of course that the battery is still shot, and doesn't work at all anymore, but has to be plugged in for anything to work at all.

More good news. I finally solved a little issue I was having with Ubuntu, on the wireless. Ubuntu Jaunty doesn't normally connect to my router by wireless (Intrepid, which powers my laptop, works fine, and always has). I can't change the security type on the router, no matter how many times people tell me to. The solution? The madwifi site has native Linux drivers.
The bad news? I have no idea how to use these ones. I don't pretend to know everything about Ubuntu or Linux, and previously, all wireless drivers I used worked through NDISWrapper, which is basically a translation layer - the router thinks it's talking to a windows computer - NDISWrapper - and NDISWrapper translates the communications to Linux-readable forms.
(You're welcome to give me a hand with sorting this out, by the way)

Last good news. Firefox has an update, 3.5 version being released. Lots of good features, and through the Nightly Tester Tools, I can keep a few of my older addons working until a proper update happens.
The bad news? Windows Live Hotmail sends blank emails. I found a temporary solution, the User Agent Switcher addon, since the prime reason according the the FireFox community is that FireFox 3.5 is blacklisted by hotmail, as are a few other browsers.
I haven't tested this idea yet, since Ubuntu doesn't yet have a 3.5 update for FireFox, I expect that in due course.

So, in this case, my recent silence turned out to prove that no news was indeed good news.