He's been having a bit of trouble in the technology department recently has our Mr H, which has put him a bit out of sorts. Thing is, for some time now Gadget Man has been dying to get hold of this swanky new kind of machine called a music server onto which you can download all your CDs.

He's been having a bit of trouble in the technology department recently has our Mr H, which has put him a bit out of sorts. Thing is, for some time now Gadget Man has been dying to get hold of this swanky new kind of machine called a music server onto which you can download all your CDs. So far, despite finding exactly what he wanted - which took not an inconsiderable length of time - it's not going well.

A server is similar to one of those hand-held portable MP3 or ipod jobbies but a bit more grown up. It's something altogether bigger, (graphite grey in our case) and static which slots into a home stacking system, somewhere between the amp and where the CD player would once have been. The point being that you download all your music into it and then relay it through speakers throughout the house which you can play by genre, artist, random selection or whatever.

Mind you he did start with an MP3 first. As you probably know it takes about three weeks to rip and download a fair size collection of music onto one of those but this little marvel just didn't satisfy his itch. Even before he'd loaded on the final CD, he'd heard about this other thing.

First he had to wait for it to be developed and launched, then the search for the physical piece of kit took us respectively from Guildford to Colchester and several other places in between. Finally the great day arrived and we made a 60 mile round trip to collect it. Then he went into Purdah again for another three weeks downloading everything onto that.

It worked well. For about six weeks. Then it froze, he re-booted, and contents-wise he lost the whole caboodle. There were terse words (very short and succinct) and very thin lips. So we did the 60 mile round trip again for a replacement. So there were three more weeks ripping, then the same thing happened again.

This time he got a blaster disc in the post, and at some point managed to back up everything, blast the machine, update it and re-load. Again it took a day or so. He downloaded two more CDs and it failed again. Suffice to say the music server is now in intensive care in the manufacturers workshop and Mr H is heading towards intensive care at home. Wonderful stuff this new technology.