Without doubt the best gadget on the market today is the TomTom GPS. Rats, all I have is a Garmin model. Of course, the Garmin GPS device will get you from A to B perfectly well but it will not get you there with Billy Connolly doing the voice-over complete with all the wise-cracks and conversational asides.

One of the most irritating gadgets I have seen for a long time is one my brother bought for my son last Christmas. It is an alarm clock where, to switch the alarm off, you have to input the correct answer to a puzzle. Not a task to lightly embark upon when you have just been roused from sleep.

Anyway, much of the technology news this week’s has been about McAfee who have managed to trash thousands of PCs with their anti-virus product. This time around their product identifies svchost.exe, a critical Windows application, as a virus and promptly deletes the program. Upon reboot Windows will fail to start and reboot again repeatedly.

Earlier this year we awarded the prestigious Fraynor Award for the Technologically Embarrassed to Symantec for doing exactly the same trick so as the chief judge on the Fraynor Award panel I feel disinclined in awarding McAfee with the honour because if they really wanted the award they should have done something special and not just copied Symantec.

However, the McAfee incident did affect lots of people including the Iowa Community Emergency Response Centre who were in a middle of a disaster recovery exercise when they lost all their computers, despite this they carried on and still managed to complete the exercise without the systems being available.