I have to admit to a terrible addiction of hoarding old computer parts. I'm in the middle of a three way room swap - my office is becoming Kier's bedroom, Freya is moving into his vacated bedroom and now her old bedroom, the smallest in the house, is now the office. It's a tricky maneuver and up until this weekend we had a quantum superposition of bedroom states. I collapsed one part of that at the weekend and now there is no office detritus in Kier's s new bedroom. There's nothing else either yet, but that has to wait until next weekend.

Having far less space means I have to do the unthinkable and throw some stuff out! I'm resigned to the fact that my PC building days are over - I'm exclusively a laptop user now. Here's the roll call of some of the victims:

• A Western Digital Caviar 1210 hard disk dated 2 November 1993 with a capacity of 212.6 MB - I believe this came from the first PC I ever fully owned.
• An internal ZIP drive from 1997 plus half a dozen ZIP disks.
• A truly ancient IBM external floppy drive with proprietary thinkpad connector
• An internal DDS2 DAT drive plus a dozen tapes with unknown contents (obsolete in the face of writeable DVDs)
• An ultra-slim CD drive that came out of a Compaq server and so has a proprietary interface
• A floppy drive missing the disk eject button
• A trackball that never worked with any of my vaios
• Several mice
• A Hewlett Packard Deskjet Portable circa 1996 - single sheet feed
• An external tricom modem designed for laptops (when was the last time I had a laptop without a built-in modem?)
• Dozens of random cables...

The following items go into Kier's hands to help feed his insatiable appetite for all things electronic:

• Two IBM Fast/Wide SCSI cards
• An Intel Celeron 500
• A Tyan Tiger motherboard