In the UK in particular, and the world overall, everything nowadays has to be really PC. PC meaning Politically Correct. In my time, PC meant personal computer. Which is possibly a good analogy to make between the two, because there?s nothing as politically incorrect as not having a personal computer to use in the art of scrapbooking.

We bought a new home computer this last weekend. Both my MATH (man about the house) and I work in the IT industry and know our way around computers. Or so we thought.

I've always used my home PC copiously for scrapbooking and crafts, in fact I really should have named it something along those scrapping lines (what? Scrapcomp? Mr Scrappy? The ScrapHeap?). My MATH never got a look-in - the time he had to sit himself in front of the PC to look at emails or play his little football games can be counted on a calendar day. Whilst there are very few days in my personal life where the personal computer has not been used to either print out journaling or titles for layouts, or capture scrapbooking related emails, browse scrapbooking forums, or download scrapbooking files.

You should see my file collection - pdfs, word documents, instructions, articles. The internet is a truly amazing resource nowadays. I would feel like I had an arm missing without it.

Which might explain my utter frustration over the last few days as MATH and I attempted to set-up something we should have known how to set-up. Internet and email withdrawal symptoms - there must be a name for it. My scrapbooking just went down the tubes for the previous week.

Three days and late nights later, and I think these two technical geeks have lost their degrees in geekness. I managed to get the printers installed (well, one of them) and the scanner and possibly the digital camera. But we bought this latest whiz bang PC to take over my scrapbooking computer tasks as I'd filled the hard-drive of the old one. So, the intentions were to network into the old computer, to allow me to share all those old and large scrapbooking files.

We were sold the latest and greatest USB port wireless networking technology by the computer shop salesman. Opening up one of these cellophane wrapped boxes we found the box contents missing, so had to travel back the 20 miles to the shop to get a replacement. On installing, we then found that the technology nowadays (including our expensive new computer and monitor) doesn't come with user manuals anymore. No guides whatsoever. At least from PC World. No service, either - their salesmen only want to sell a part, not work out whether it will work for what you're buying it for.

After a bit of tweeking (read : two nights, and 10 solid hours) we managed to get the two computers wirelessly connected to each other. That doesn't mean anything of value - they don't actually see each other, and I can't find either computer on the network. In other words, I can't see my precious files (nor my storage of all those digital photographs, for that matter). I took my frustration into work yesterday, and consulted the internet, my oracle. It let me down.

It seems that our problems are spectacularly commonplace in this industry. In fact, setting up communications between two or more computers is easy - it's the networking and file sharing which is not. Which is the whole point of networking in the first place, no? There are all means of geeky internet forums out there attempting to resolve my and everybody else's problems. It's all to do with Windows XP, and turning off personal firewalls, and setting something called Netbios over IP/TCP comms, and setting adhoc or other kinds of networks, and, and, and- No one, not even www.computergeeksanonymous.com appear to be able to resolve these issues. It becomes openly complicated (as against secretly complicated) by the fact we at home are dealing with two different Window operating systems, and the new PC we bought doesn't even have a floppy drive in it, so we can't move over the networking.exe which would do it all for us (yeah, right!). New PC has removable smart-cardy storage solutions, old PC has floppy drive. Calculation does not compute.

Because we work in the industry, we have consulted knowledgeable workmates - these are people who do this at work for a living. The general decision going forward from real life experts, is to give up on the idea (and someone will kindly write all of my files onto dvd for me, so I'll have them to read if I need to). Exit one useless and older PC - rejected despite its practicality. Enter one PC, which suffers from lack of floppy and no worthy software. I now have commenced the installation of all my lovely scrapbooking related software - only to find that half of them don't have an installation cd or executable to use.

Eventually I should have a working, if blank, new PC to fill up. Eventually I should have the ability to recommence scrapbooking again, feeling like I have all the tools I have a need for. Maybe eventually I'll create an actual real life layout.