There’s life in my old laptop yet. I finally got round to reinstalling Windows XP on my IBM T23. I heartily recommend a good old clear-out to revitalise an aging pc. Suddenly the same Pentium III, that only yesterday was coughing a spluttering along, is flying at breakneck speed.

So much clutter is gone! One of the perils of Web.2.0 is that there are so many free downloads that your computer quickly becomes clogged up. Most of them, frankly, I never use. Then there are all the drivers from peripherals that are now languishing in the attic.

The major obstacle was backing up all my documents - but was made reasonably painless by investing in an external hard drive and dumping everything onto it in one go. From then on, it’s mostly patience. Reinstalling software (finding the keys) remembering old passwords for websites -all this is a bore - but worth it.