PC support needs your support

You see, desktop support staff get more hassle from these areas of the business than any other department, according to a survey by Support.com.

Finance professionals are also technically challenged (assuming that's the PC term for it. PC? Geddit? Never mind...)

Nearly 17 per cent of our put-upon help desk staff blame the beancounters for adding to their daily dose of misery.

But maybe our friends in desktop support should thank us all (and, indeed, Microsoft): if we never had a problem with our PCs, they wouldn't have a job to do, would they?

Got any good helpdesk stories? Why not post a reader comment below...

The winners in the country's first text message poetry competition were unveiled by the Guardian last Friday.

There were 7,500 entries to the competition, ranging from the sublime, Larkin-esque "They phone you up, your mum and dad", to the rather more earthly entry from a certain Charlotte Fortune, whose poem contained these lines:

"no, i am not linda,
I hv not slept w/yr sis,
+i wd nvr call any1's ma a slag"

But the Guardian's lofty judges chose this as the best of the bunch:

"txtin iz messin,
mi headn'me englis,
try2rite essays,
they all come out txtis.
gran not plsed w/letters shes getn,
swears i wrote better
b4 comin2uni.
&she's african"

In the week June 7 was named as polling day, it would be remiss of us not to mention what will become known as the e-lection. Probably. Well, it will by us anyway.

Labour has unveiled a new website (http://www.labour.org.uk ) which it hopes will bring some floating voters back down to earth (see http://www.silicon.com/a44268 ).

You can even have Labour news sent to your mobile or PDA.

Predictably, the Tories aren't impressed, and have indulged in some invective against Millbank's new media mandarins. The Conservatives' chief internet planner told us: "We're very keen to avoid the sort of classic 'political' website style like the Labour Party, based on invective against your opponents and boring press releases in a boring press release style."

In other words, invective's OK offline, but not on online.

The Tories will reveal some whizzy stuff nearer election time, apparently. Our Conservative friend said: "When we get closer to the election we have planned new innovations which take our ideas to the next stage"

Meanwhile, you can download some lovely wallpaper and screensavers from Labour's site, including a copy of the famous Economic Disaster II poster and the equally famous red rose logo.

A Labour Party newsletter makes this plea: "Help us get our message across and have the coolest screen in your home or office."

Has no one told them that as soon as you say something you're doing is cool, it immediately loses any vestige of coolness? Serge Gainsbourg never walked around saying, "Look at me, I'm cool", did he?

Never mind. Well done to Labour for trying to use technology as a vote winner. Well done to the Tories for having some ideas.

UK business is wasting £10m a week connecting to the net using dial-up modems. According to broadband service provider OnCue, 37 million minutes of local calls are used up by companies using dial-up lines to get online. The survey (which can be accused of the statistical equivalent of creative accounting) revealed that the average employee visits 477 pages a week, waiting 56 minutes for them to download. The telephone connection time costs £1m, while the other £9m comes from lost productivity (and gives rise to a much better headline in the process).

Nevertheless, broadband access continues to get your goat, especially those of you who live in the countryside (and who therefore might actually own a goat).

This week, the government announced plans to appoint some consultants who will be asked to write a report which will tell the government how it should go about encouraging service providers to roll-out broadband in rural areas.

That will take us up to September, so don't hold your breath for anything concrete to emerge.

The problem is that telcos find it hard to make money from users in the countryside - hence there's no economic incentive for them to get DSL to anywhere even vaguely remote.

Mind you, it does seem that someone needs to define what constitutes 'remote' (a topic we've touched upon before). One Round-Up reader lives in Norwich, the capital city of Norfolk and an area of high internet penetration. He checked out BT's ADSL rollout plans, and Norwich isn't in them. No explanation given - just no dice. He wonders if Norwich has (unbeknownst to him) been moved into the countryside.

(The Round-Up has a vague recollection that this may in fact be to do with a lot of the local loop in that part of the world being made of aluminium instead of copper, and subsequently being unsuitable for DSL. But please correct us if we're wrong.)

Our man in Norwich turned to his local cable provider, NTL. They can't provide him with high speed net access either. Apparently, this is due to "Cable and Wireless' poor network in this area" - the excuse NTL trots out at the drop of a hat these days when anything goes wrong.

We can't offer much consolation to our reader in Norwich other than to say, you're not alone. A friend of the Round-Up lives in Acton, which is within spitting distance of the area in which BT first trialled ADSL. He can't get ADSL from BT. And his cable provider is NTL...

That's it for now. You might like to know that we generous folk at silicon.com are practically giving away the latest, highly compelling business manual which might just revolutionise your life. It's called Corporate Voodoo - see http://www.silicon.com/a44249 for more info.

And as we constantly strive to improve the services we offer you, dear reader, it would help us immensely if you could take five minutes out of your busy schedule to fill in this questionnaire: http://research.silicon.com/confirm/wi/p0088254/i.asp . We just want to give you what you want. What you really, really want (etc).

The Round-Up will (probably) be spicing up your life again next Friday...