I'm currently using a 3 yr-old Toshiba Satellite notebook as my main PC at home. I'd bought it after my previous Gateway PC died (OK, I was an idiot and plugged in a USB device upside down without looking and totally shorted out the motherboard. D'Oh!). The one I had before that was a "clone" Pentium-100 that I'd had for ages - it has been serving quite well as DS1's PC - he's only 6 so most of the software he runs works quite happily on a P-100. Unfortunately when I got home tonight I was informed that they'd had to turn it off when there was a "bang" and smell of smoke. I inspected the PC and all appeared OK, but the old VDU was smelling of smoke, so I think it's the monitor that has broken. I can probably pick up a replacement monitor for free as lots of people seem to put out old/broken PCs for collection when the bi-monthly council cleanup is on.

One of these days I'll buy a new desktop PC (probably a Dell) as I'd like to be able to edit and burn our home videos onto DVD and run some of the games I have. The notebook doesn't run most of my games as it doesn't have a suitable graphics card, and it only has a DVD player and CD-burner. I keep putting off buying the new PC though as each year they get cheaper and have better features. I've bought quite a few PCs since my first one (a Sinclair ZX80) and got a bit sick of spending a couple of thousand dollars every couple of years on a new PC.