So you want to work from home? Fine, but be prepared to get a bit swamped and slightly depressed by all the gadgets around designed to "help".

For example, a comfortable keyboard is essential. Of course, I really shouldn't be typing this at all. I should be speaking it into my sparkly new Olympus W-10 digital voice recorder. That was the theory when I availed myself of the thing; voice dictation, that'll be useful. Except that as a lone worker it would be much simpler to type the thing straight on the page - no one else is going to do it for me, recorded on to the widget or otherwise. Twigged that one just after I bought it.

And anyway, now that I think about it I already have a voice memo facility on my PDA.

OK, PDAs. And yes, I do need more than one. What do you mean, why? I need the iPaq because - OK, OK, I no longer actually need the iPaq. It was my first hand-held and it was extremely good, but then I got a commission to write for a company newsletter that involved Palm products. Reckoning I should become an expert with Palms immediately, I bought a Tungsten-T (I could bore you with all the technical stuff, but I got it because it was the shiniest). It worked perfectly, as did the iPaq.

The two of them were fine until someone wanted a review of a Smartphone, so I acquired a Sony Ericsson P800 and now won't part with it; all your PDA functions and the phone in the same unit. It's much more convenient.

I think I realised I had a problem when the PC to which they were simultaneously attached kept crashing. My wife couldn't understand it, then she walked into the office, took a look, said: "Aah, poor computer, look at all that," and walked straight out again. I've been an IT journalist 14 years and she stumps me with that. So all except the P800 are now on my "retired" shelf.

They sit next to an elderly MP3 player. This is about five years old and holds, coo, about 14 tracks; I was working on a TV programme called "Chips with Everything" helping viewers with IT woes. I had this idea that I needed, at least, to play with a digital camera, MP3 player and all that stuff, so that when people wrote in I'd know what they were talking about. So I bought a small MP3 player and a cheap Sanyo camera. This wasn't clever.

Clapperton's 15th Rule of IT says that technology will start dating from the moment you buy it. Clapperton's 15th Rule of IT (a) says if you hit the bargain basement you'll be buying technology that has already had its day. Which is fine if you're just going to use it, but if you're trying to keep up...

I think I used the Sanyo three times, and then abandoned it. It doesn't matter though, because there's a camera on the P800 and another that attaches to the phone it replaced. And on the voice recorder, come to that. They'll be putting them on the backs of packets of corn flakes next. But none are quite as high-res as a proper one, which is why I bought a Sony Cybershot-u a couple of weeks ago, mostly because it's a tiddler. And shiny. And so is the current MP3 player and yes as a matter of fact I did know the P800 plays those as well, but I like to have some regard for its battery life on the off-chance that someone might actually phone it. And its memory for music isn't very big.

Yes, of course, you can get storage cards, but I've been caught out by storage before.

"Here's a superb back-up solution," they said. "Two gigabytes a cartridge," they laughed. "It's called an Iomega Jaz drive." It was obsolete within months of my buying it. I never did get the hang of Zip drives; besides, rewriteable CDs were just around the corner. It was much more convenient to forget to back up on to those, than to neglect backing up on to fiddlier stuff.

Speaking of storage, I was lucky enough to start freelancing just after 5.25in disks bit the dust, but I admit I don't know why I keep all those 3.5in disks around the place. Sure, I've got the drive for it if I need to use one, but - now that you mention it - that drive only fits into the loft computer (every loft should have one).

And don't give me this stuff about hanging on to the computer, just upgrading the graphics card, audio card, chip, memory, the speakers and the rest, as and when. If you upgrade to Pentium 4 you need a new motherboard, too.

So if you mean "just keep the casing and throw the rest away" do say so, then do the maths and don't come crying to me when you realise it's actually cheaper to buy a complete new PC these days.

Or a Mac. I'm not a Mac user myself, but I bought one for reviewing software. It's no use excluding Mac stuff when you're reviewing office suites - Mac-friendly readers would riot. But review commissions dried up about a week after I bought it two years ago. True to form I've lost the power adapter now, or it's on my "retired" shelf along with more bits of wire than most people suspect exist in the entire world.

As is my super-whizzy Creative Labs Audigy card - turn your laptop into a system with full-blown sound, it says, until you change the laptop and realise that you've bought one with rather a nice sound thingy from Yamaha in it already, and which works perfectly when you just plug the speakers in.

It's no use. I'm going to have to give up on gadgets. Dect phones, more PDAs (I didn't tell you about the one I gave to my mum, and she's using it) and don't even talk to me about the various in-car GPS systems around the place at the moment. I'm quitting, I'm off; I'm going to live in a cave for a year and the hell with technology.

Or maybe I'll just put up another "retired" shelf...