We're a two processor cores per person household

I'm not one to hang onto computers, but eBay and the Royal Mail are forcing me to, thanks to criminally-high fees and postage insurance costs, and computers are so cheap now that we're sort of collecting them.

Kitchen - Mac Mini

For some time now, we've had a Mac mini in our kitchen. I thought myself that this was extravagant at the time, and I'm sure all our visitors did too, but it really makes sense for us. Our kitchen is surrounded on all sides by thick walls, because it's part of an extension to the mail house, so it's where we play loud music. So, we have iTunes on it, and we have it plugged into a loud stereo. We also use it for web browsing and for recording and watching TV (Formula 1 and kids TV, mostly).

Big laptop - Advent something or other

My wife has her own laptop for work. This is a pretty bog-standard 15" laptop, really. Nothing special about it, except I removed Vista. Vista really shouldn't be installed on laptops

Small laptop - Advent 4211

I wanted an MSI Wind, having followed the madness surrounding the Eee PC with it's tiny screen. Sorry, but 7" screens are just too small. The MSI Wind has a 10" screen. As luck would have it, Advent rebadged the MSI Wind as an Advent 4211. It's exactly the same machine, but with a cheaper case, and it costs £50 less. I've had teething problems with it, but nothing I couldn't overcome. This has a single core Atom processor.

Office - HP Phenom X3 with 4GB RAM

Who needs 4GB RAM? I saw iTunes 8 using nearly 600MB of it the other day, and I've managed to end up using 3GB of it so far. And with me creating 30GB DB tables, the hard drive needs to be pretty quick too. Nice machine so far, although I've already ripped the fan off the graphics card and replaced it with a big, slower fan rather than take it back to the shop.

Where next? Seven computers? Eight?

The thing is, I can already forsee a time when four computers aren't enough - when I 'need' a really low power computer I can leave on for file sharing and printer sharing, and a computer in the living room for movies so we don't need to keep all our DVDs on the shelves. And then there's the kids. The thing is, all these things use power, and only the MSI Wind clone is low power, really. Everything else chucks out massive amounts of heat. My computers are going to bankrupt me via my electricity bill. If I were Apple right now, I'd be looking at replacing the Mac Mini with something Atom-based that's really low power. That might entice me to go to five computers!