Seriously, though, I was recently thinking more or less the same thing: getting back my old Compaq M300 that I lent to a friend: as you say, I didn’t really care what happened to it (as its battered magnesium case will attest), whereas I sometimes worry about scratching my PBook from putting it into its Second Skin softcase too often!

Regarding the gaming issue: I see you can get the new PS2 or the X-Box for under £100 now. Obviously the graphics are not quite as good as a high-end gaming PC, but you can’t even get a high-end gaming CARD for less than £200. And in the “hours-of-fun” category you really need to play online, which X-Box Live apparently does really well. I personally spend a lot of time playing BZFlag, which is a free, multiplatform online tank-war game. It’s kind of how the old Atari BattleZone arcade game would have looked if it had had full-colour raster graphics. With flying tanks…