cut and paste

[RevJac]

Okay I am officially an Idiot.

cut and paste are not working correctly and I have reached critical mass on this. 

recently purchased new laptop (hp pavilion G6).   The desktop i built a few years ago died of motherboard failure so decided to go with a laptop. 

first found the problem using the microsoft windows starter packs provided with the initial software on the g6. 

Problem description:

   copy microsoft excell cells

   move external mouse to new cells click to paste

      paste options would show up for a millisecond then gray out (unable to use)

  I attempted to use standard cntl keys (cntl/c, cntl/x, cntl/v)  but no luck. 

I assumed this was a built in failure to get me to purchase the full office system (add in lots of profanity here)

HOWEVER

  found the same problem with Mozilla/firefox.  Cut data from a twitter tweet (worked fine), but paste was greyed out.  numerous attempts showed this is a problem on many software.

one item, microsoft shows the paste options for a millisecond (a tantalizing hint at what may be possible) before it greys them out. 

okay, new to windows 7  (old xp user) but I am fairly computer literate, so where is the **bleep** switch to put cut and paste back the way it was before the engineers decided to fix something that was not broken?