While Jon finds cool apps to help him continue not quite drowning in the information ocean, I'm happily playing in the other end of the pool, while being slightly pre-occupied with reducing the current number of niggles that my new PC is displaying—or, more accurately, Vista is displaying. Or perhaps its the not quite 100% happy relationship between my HP box and Vista, or what I have plugged into the box. OK, I don't know what its problem is.

That aside, I now am in the happy position of having a dedicated machine for 'proper work at home' and a cute, albeit slightly under spec-ed, laptop for on the road use. I even managed (with a bit of help) to establish a rudimentary home wireless network of sorts so that i can do easy file transfer, storage / back up and the like.

We made a company decision to upgrade our mobile comms in summer-ish last year, and signed what looked to be the market leading deal with T-Mobile Business at the time—we all got new BlackBerrys, wifi hotspot access (weirdly enough since signing up I haven't seen a single one—(today someone told me that Starbucks have them)) and, a first for me, a USB 3G/HSDPA modem, which, while not quite matching the speed I get at home, gives me nearly 2Mbit/s Internet access when I'm out and about.

Plug it in, it works, doesn't seem to be forgotten by my laptop if I don't use it for a while and, all in all, for a relatively easy going / undemanding information worker, is quite a fine mechanism for getting me what I need when I'm working when travelling in the UK. (Lets not talk about international roaming charges, as far as i know they are still a bit steep, and not something a small company like ours wants to get into. Stay in a decent hotel, that's my advice there.)

None of this is at all novel, i know. But over Christmas I did think of a novel-ish application for these things—Mother in Laws.

After several years of owning a PC and letting her grandchildren fill it with garbage she ended up hating the thing and wasn't interested in a quick drive reformat and software reload—but she was keen on the idea of a laptop. To her credit the willingness was there, but perhaps a different form factor, one in which she could stick under a book and pull out whenever she fancied would be less intimidating than a full set-up—desk, monitor, lots of wires etc.

The second challenge was Internet access—an out-dated 1Mb/sec download speed for nearly £20/month hindered by a low spec PC weighed down by the aforementioned grandson-induced Internet garbage.

The laptop issue was easily solved—£399 (or less if you want to go own brand) gets you a decent looking and spec-ed Toshiba with lots of USB ports, wireless card, duel core processor and a decent memory—more than enough for most people. We bought it, it came home and it worked. One of the above mentioned Grandsons also benefitted from inheriting the old PC. This worked out well for him, given it had all the garbage he'd put there, still on it.

The dongle idea only occurred to me after I realised that even the slightest amount of hassle would put my Mother in Law off—I guess that's a pretty easy rule of thumb—if you can't plug it in and it works, probably no point as it wont get used again once you've left.

Now, Freeform's corporate plan with T-mobile wouldn't suit, neither would most of the other providers' current offerings as they all equate pretty much to standard broadband, pricewise. 3, however, has recently started offering a tiered mobile Internet deal starting from £10/month (sufficient for the best part of 1000 emails, 30 song downloads or a lot of time just surfing). Not much, but more than adequate for an entry level user. We called, we ordered. It came, it got plugged in and it worked. No phone line, no modem, certainly no wireless router to mess around with—quite simply, out of the box and no hassle. 3's 'turbo network' promises download speeds in the region of 3Mb/s if you are within range—if it performs to half of that its a bargain. The only hassle we had was trying to make it work the day before 3 had expected it to arrive via courier, and hadn't turned on my mother in law's account.

So there we have it, a very low hassle, low cost way of getting someone you know who simply hasn't got the inclination to get their hands dirty but would like to 'be online', online. For a bit extra each month, it would definitely suit a student living off campus (I'm assuming most uni's offer some kind of wireless package these days) and who didnt want to install a landline—as is very common now.

It's not 'hi-tech' or innovative as ideas go, but then again, it doesn't get any easier than this, so perhaps it is.

My 72 year old Mother in Law has the most simple and elegant way of getting online and accessing the best mainstream 3G mobile broadband service available today. And she couldnt care less, as long as it keeps working.