With a week of relative peace and quiet to play with, I decided to reduce the amount of fire-fighting I will have to do over the next year.

I did this by cutting a few well-placed fire breaks in advance.

To this end, I have been fiendishly busy stripping down my computers and giving their insides a good suck with the Dyson.

Having shifted all the fluff and cleaned the assorted nastiness from the outside of the cases, I upgraded the memory where appropriate and checked all the plugs before reassembling the machines.

It doesn't take very long and saves a lot of time and frustration over failed machines.

Computer housekeeping week continued by making sure all my machines were up-to-date with virus-detecting software and equipped with the latest drivers for peripheral devices.

In a fit of enthusiasm, I even upgraded the operating systems on all my desktop computers and installed Windows XP and MS Office XP on my laptop to see if they stand the test of time.

So far, I am extremely impressed with XP, although the whole XP registration process is a real pain.

For those who haven't yet upgraded to XP, Microsoft, quite rightly, insists you register your software through the web or by phone and has fitted XP with a function that disables the software if you don't register it in the time allowed.

Unfortunately, Microsoft's registration methods can cause a few difficulties if you want to reinstall your OS regularly or perhaps run XP quite legitimately on two computers simultaneously (maybe a desktop and a laptop).

The problem is XP recognises and identifies the computer it is installed in. So when you give the registration details to the Microsoft registration operator over the phone, the operator knows exactly how many different machines the software has been installed in and can refuse to give you an installation code if it is felt you have exceeded your quota.

I have not heard of anyone running into this problem other than myself and then only because I have a number of machines (seven) I use for reviews which need stripping down and reinstalling quite frequently.

Other housekeeping tasks include running the print head clean application on inkjet printers, taking the cartridge out of the laser printer and giving it a good shake to free up the toner, sorting out all my old floppy disks and formatting them and making sure I have ordered enough re-writable CDs, paper and ink cartridges to last me a month or two.

I have a rather old and virtually obsolete colour printer which still works well and I am loathe to chuck it out so long as I can get new ink cartridges for it.

So I was delighted to discover that a local office equipment firm, ODM (www.odm-uk.com), seems able to deliver the most obscure cartridges and charges considerably less than many High Street stores. ODM can be contacted on 01273 203100.

With all the hard work done, I know my computers are ready for some hard work, even if I would rather be at home with my feet up.