OK, as some of you know, I've been off work for about 4 weeks due to a health issue.

There's only so much daytime TV a guy can take (none), and only so many DVD's and Blu-Rays you can watch before you get bored.

Even the internet was starting to annoy me.

I also use my computer for my writing, so on Thursday afternoon, I was about to settle down with Donovan Byrne (the protagonist of my novel).

I switch the PC on....CRITICAL ERROR. SYSTEM WILL SHUT DOWN IN ONE MINUTE.

So I phone Dell, and they do all the usual stuff. No problem, so they pass me through to their software support team. Luckilly they called me back so no long 0845 calls.

The try and restore the settings back to a week earlier. Nothing. Same error. They then took control of my PC remotley and for about 5 hours ran industrial strength security scans of my PC to see if my own security had missed anything.

The fixed what they could (and there was a nasty piece of malware picked up from somewhere) and asked me to restart my PC. Nada. Same problem.

Then comes the humdinger. 'Mr. Clark, could you please back up all your files as we are going to have to do a factory image reset.'

OK, so in my house I have three 4GB memory sticks and 10CD ROM disks, which combined are going to back up hee-haw, so my wife had to bring home her external hard-drive from work (which is 232GB ), and we spent the whole weekend preparing, and backing up every file we have, which took a fair wee bit of time.

Dell just got off the phone with me about 30 minutes ago, and my PC is now as it was when it came out the box.

So the next few days are going to be spent getting back all the software which was wiped, and which weren't included in the factory settings AND transferring all the files back from the external Hard-Drive back onto my C: Drive.

As a sidebar, if anything, this has tought we to back up all my stuff. I saw an external Hard-Drive of 3Terra Bits (bytes?? ) for £60 in town the other day. As a bit of a ludite, is that quite good?

There's one other thing, after all this grief over the weekend, watching the Jeremy Kyle Show on daytime TV doesn't seem so bad.

Ah computers... can't live with them, can't live without 'em! I usually hate ringing tech support places because they spend ages going through really simple things like turning it off and back on again like that isn't the first thing everybody tries anyway! On the plus side to setting it all the way back to the beginning of its life, computers never run better than when they first come out of the box.

A 3 Terrabyte hard drive is about the same as 3000GB so if you get that you will never run out of space again! A year or two ago I paid £60 for a 250GB external hard drive so I would say that was a damn good deal.

Have you ever known anyone who has been on Jeremy Kyle? I watched it once when I was off work and saw somebody I knew on there. That was a real low point in my short life!

Yeah, it was your sister!