Christ I have heard it all, apparently Aer Lingus had a computer problem yesterday that essentially meant that Business Class flights to the US were offered on the website at €5 when infact they should be €1775.

Aer Lingus "copped on " to this problem after 2 hours and after some 100 people had "availed" of this offer, and paid with their credit cards, which would appear to satisfy the law of contract, but no! Aer Lingus cancelled all of these peoples bookings by sending them an email and "inviting them to re-book".

I heard Enda Corneille, Director, no less, of Corporate Affairs speak on Morning Ireland and saying something to the effect that people should have realised it was a honest mistake, I almost threw the radio out the window.

I heard recently of someone making their way back from a trip and the return date was incorrect on the piece of paper.The return date was entered incorrectly by the person, a honest mistake, but that person had to pay €400 to get home, and Aer Lingus's attitude was " its your fault you pay for it".

So when Aer Lingus makes a mistake, its our fault for not realising that the price could'nt be correct, when we make a mistake again its our fault. One would begin to wonder if you can trust anything that would appear on the website by way of prices.

If Aer Lingus are allowed to get away with this what is stopping them from changing the price of flights after you have paid for them?, I know that sounds silly but were are the customers rights here?. More importantly due to the advent of internet shopping, is the law of contract no longer valid? from this situation it would appear so.

I cant believe that they did'nt simply say "right we f*#ked up let the people go for the fiver", they could have actually used it for good marketing, I know thats an oxymoron,but no,they came out with a defense that frankly in the same class as "the dog ate my homework".

If you're buying retail and go into any of the high street stores such as PC World, Comet, Currys, John Lewis, Dixons, Tesco all laptops on sale come pre-installed with Windows Vista. If you go online to Compaq, Toshiba, Sony, HP, Acer and the rest, you have no choice but to buy Windows Vista. In fact, all websites display the same message "Toshiba recommends Windows Vista", "HP recommends Windows Vista", "VAIO recommends Windows Vista", "Acer recommends Windows Vista" on and on ad nauseam.

With the consistent wording, these recommendations clearly originate from Microsoft rather than clinical engineering tests. Microsoft are heavily incentivising manufacturers to push Vista which has unbelievably been in development since 2001, consuming Microsoft people and money. Despite this, Vista, delivered three years late, doesn't perform any better than XP and needs some serious hardware just to run the graphical "Aero" interface such as 1GB of system memory and a 40GB hard drive capacity.  

Business customers running Vista Business were thrown a life buoy, being quietly allowed to "downgrade" to XP. Retail customers, however, don't have the same licensing choice. If you have it, you're stuck with it. The main change in Vista is the unnecessary user interface and an improved search function as it tries to catch up with Google. Oh, and My Computer has been renamed Computer.

With Vista OS I am reminded of the Apple II being replaced with the Apple III in the early 1980s. The Apple III was designed by Marketeers and was the beginning of the end of Apples leading market position until it started to find itself again with the iPod. Vista has the look and feel of a development being led by Marketeers, it's not an operating system of choice.

So what is the alternative? As you can't seem to buy a laptop with XP you can return to Apple and the MAC OS (once it's not the "leopard" 10.5) or you can build your own with a Linux distribution such as Ubuntu, i.e. buy a Vista Laptop and uninstall the Vista OS. For the moment, my choice is not to buy.

Is it any wonder Vista is ranked number one by PC World as the biggest tech disappointment of 2007?

1. Windows Vista
2. The High Definition format War
3. Facebook Beacon
4. Yahoo
5. Apple iPhone
6. The Broadband Industry
7. Voice Over IP
8. Apple "Leopard" OS 10.5
9. Microsoft Office 2007
10. Wireless Carriers
11. Microsoft Zune
12. Internet Security
13. Social Networks
14. Municipal WiMax
15. Amazon Unbox

After my Toshiba had to be binned I got an IBM T21 and an IBM T22. I still keep the hard drive of the Toshiba as a reminder to myself to take backups. It sits over the fireplace with an old clock, a picture of Freud, a fossil, and a photograph frame made from cactus wood.

There still is some very useful data on the drive, but I've never been prepared to pay the sums needed to retrieve it. But back to my IBM's.....

The T21 I always used as a reserve, it's been the presentation machine, not cluttered up with some of the servers and applications I've been running on the T22. That was until I started getted the BSOD (blue screen of death) on the T22. It finally got to the point where it wouldn't restart after a crash.

After some internet searching I replaced the memory with two 256k cards, and for a while everything was great. The laptop powered up, and the overall speed improved - until yesterday, three weeks after replacing the memory, now the machine is a dud, the memory is burned out. Fortunately I've been able to slot the hard drive out and plug it into the T21, but the T21 is so slow. The screen freezes, I get terribly annoyed with it...

Is there anything better out there, I need the portability of a laptop with the resilience of a server?

Why would anyone write a program that..........

Why would anyone write a program that would automatically restart your computer? A program so persistent that, when you click "Restart Later",  you only get a moratorium of ten minutes before the message pops up again with the same determined prompt? Every ten minutes, as though it were taking orders from the atomic clock. The message gives you five minutes to act. This is less time than it takes to go to the toilet, make a coffee and return to your desk. In which time, the relentless program has shut your computer, ignoring your unsaved work, like the spreadsheet or letter you've been painfully composing.

It doesn't even take a trip to the toilet.  You might be retrieving a file, or talking to someone or pacing the room on your mobile. Why would someone write a program that can restart you computer, and wipe your work, as you do that?

Before anyone says, "Well, you can change the settings", I already know that, and that's part of the problem. In an age of hot desking and shared computers you inherit the settings of previous users. Some, not unsurprisingly, might select the recommended setting, which will run this program.

For those that might not know how to change their setting click Start followed by Control Panel. Look for the icon below and double click.

Change the settings. My preferred setting as pictured below is to not download automatically. I like to decide what to install and run on my machine. I learned this after installing Service Pack 2, to discover afterwards my DVD drive didn't work anymore as there were no supported drivers.