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This process took about two hours and while I found it simple enough, I’ve been in this position many times before. By the end of it I had some sympathy for my friends. They suffered from a problem and spent a fair amount of cash to rectify the situation yet had been left hanging high and dry.

If they had wanted to blame someone, and they’re certainly in the right trade to do it, then we would all laugh at their gullibility, but all they wanted was a working PC. Broadband opens us all up to viruses, Trojans and worms, as well as sundry PC problems, and if it all goes wrong you need to get a willing relative or a local shop to fix it. Once you’ve spent £300 you might hope that your problems are over, but the absence of a Firewall, plus a certain naivety on the part of my friends almost guaranteed that they would suffer more problems in the future.

Surely someone, somewhere, has let them down. When I’m wondering who deserves to be savaged, my usual rule of thumb is to look at whoever has been paid money and to see whether they have delivered a decent service. It’s hard to see how either Dell or AOL is at fault in this case, which is a pity as they are such tempting targets, and it’s difficult to be harsh on the PC shop who installed the new hard drive as they seem to have delivered exactly what was asked for, no more and no less. Perhaps we should criticise Microsoft for not bringing out a Windows version called Dumb Client Edition that doesn’t have the rights to install software or to mess around with ActiveX but I have to confess that it’s not a piece of software that I would buy. Hopefully Windows Vista will help in this respect as well as sorting out phishing problems with Internet Explorer 7.

Let’s think about this for a moment.

Buy a new PC and you can expect a set-up sheet that helps you to plug the thing together, but there’s nothing to help the newbie get to grips with Windows. If you have a problem with your PC then you’ll have to resort to the dreaded helpline and sooner or later you’ll be wondering whether the problem is self-inflicted. Most PC vendors have huge experience of fixing the most bizarre PC problems, and many of them can achieve this without either admitting liability or telling their customer that they are a fool but they have to do this almost single-handed. You don’t require the equivalent of a driving licence before you can use a PC or head out into the badlands of the Internet and if you sign up for evening classes you may well be landed with an earnest teacher called Roger who wears corduroy and owns an Austin Allegro. When my mother asked me about the perils of the Internet and viruses I told her to use common sense and to have little faith in human nature or emails from Lagos. I stand by that advice but I have to confess, I never thought I’d need to offer it to a pair of lawyers.

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