Learning new computer skills

Hallo,
Long time - no see. I have a good excuse....Our ancient computer is dying a S L O W death - still works but oh so slow...so as we had been toying with the idea for awhile we got ourselves a laptop. I spent the first couple days just playing with the laptop (it has vista which I am not used to) and getting my saved files transfered. Then I discovered that when I logged into yahoo my favorites list didn't transfer, and there was no way I could find (very noncomputer person here) to put them in a file to transfer, soooo that meant entering them one by one - arrggg.
Well on top of that I decided I needed a new photo editing program cause I didn't like the one on the old computer - so we got photoshop elements - which subsequently taken me the rest of the weekend to even get started. I have now officially figured out how to do the basic editing, add a watermark, and resize so that I can email them at a reasonable size....and as you can tell from this set of photos I have also figured out some of the special effects.
The first photo is a cropped and edited version of a photo I posted awhile back of some of my cactus when they bloomed.
The second photo is using a brush strokes filter, the third a film grain filter, and I forgot the name of the last filter but it gives a cool art deco look.
All for tonight ya'll - hope to get some things done in the craft room tomorrow to show you (can you guess - another bottle, but then I will have the card I will make to go with it and I plan to try something in the way of a clear card...
Take Care
Tera