upgrading xubuntu through the update panel should work fine, but if your system has been acting up then its probably worth doing a full install anyway, to fix the problems.

now seems to be a good time to do that, with 8.04 being an lts release, and should have less bugs than other versions - i certainly havnt had any problems

well to me it would seem to make sense to have it do the opposite, i.e. download to from ftp to a backup folder locally would be useful.

bur their new computer cant be that different from 95 for basic tasks, can it?