I made the mistake last week of trying to upgrade my broadband, and so this week, thanks to a great deal of mismanagement on the part of my broadband supplier's accounts department, I have been without any broadband for almost a week. I'm telling you now; it was like having both hands cut off (metaphorically speaking of course). When you are used to researching, downloading e-mails and uploading websites all at the same time, it comes as quite a shock when you have to rely on good old dial up for a few days.

Even more of a shock when you remember that your business line uses an IP phone with an 0845 number. So this week has been a bit of a kick to the system. I have a phone that I tried to use for a 3G connection, but that was fairly unsuccessful as well. In the end though, I'm still here, and I have been told that the telephone line will be up and running again by about 17.30, so I am hoping that this column was only a few hours late [Cough, splutter! - Ed]

Ah, I didn't tell you about that either, did I? Well, thanks to a rather drunk individual who climbed the telephone pole next to my house last night, I have been without dial up for the last sixteen hours as well.

And what it highlighted is how much the Internet has become an essential part of everyday life. I really do mean essential as well, because without connection to the broadband, I've been stumped. Everything takes twenty times longer to do, and I had to wait for nearly an hour each day for my e-mail to download. It really made me realise just how much junk e-mail I receive. I used to wonder how good my e-mail filter is, and looking the way it copes with a slow motion download really made it clear to me that it works faster than I do.

Anyway, enough griping for this week. I'd like to make a correction to something I wrote a few weeks back about using an external USB drive on my 360 - it only works for MP3s. I'd gotten really excited and had thought that a movie file had been playable, but instead I'd forgotten that I had the same video installed on the 360 hard drive. So, not so good as I initially thought, sadly. However, now I have Media Centre happily up and running on my PC, I can stream movies anyway so that's not a problem.

I've just completed the download of the latest version of Microsoft's new operating system, and will attempt to install it on a Duron 1600 with 1GB of memory and an ATI 9600 Pro graphics card. I'm hopeful that it will run without problems, but I've heard that to get the best out of the new operating system, you should really have a full 256MB of available system memory. The Duron PC has a 60GB hard disk, so I am hoping that will be enough for this experiment. I'll keep you posted!

If you have any comments on this column of any of my feature articles, then please feel free to send me an e-mail. In the meantime, I'm going to enjoy the new 8Mb broadband that has just gone active [with my telephone line]. Actually, it is 7.1Mb, but I'm not that choosy, it's still four times faster than previously!

Send your comments to louis@micromart.co.uk.