One of the advantages of modern technology is that you don’t have to suffer the horrors of the local mall, with the endless hunts for carparks, fighting your way through the crowds of people – thanks to the wonders of the internet, you can do everything from the comfort of your home, and spend more time at the beach!

To this end, here’s a list of some of the more useful online shopping sites to check out.

• www.foodtown.co.nz/www.woolworths.co.nz – sick of supermarket shopping? With Foodtown/Woolworths you can do all your grocery shopping online – and not be tempted to get that chocolate bar as you stand waiting at the checkout!

• www.1-day.co.nz – this site is the modern equivalent of your surplus factory store – new items being cleared out at a great price. Three different clearance items are listed every day at 12pm, so it’s well worth checking out daily. However, of course, once it’s gone, it’s gone – so you need to get in quick.

• www.amazon.com – the self-proclaimed “World’s Biggest Bookstore”. Great for sourcing that hard to find book. Amazon has nearly every book known to man and still in print. With the current exchange rate, the pricing is extremely favourable, with the shipping to NZ not too expensive, and usually pretty snappy too.

• www.pleroma.co.nz/www.jeromes.co.nz – two local Christian retailers with a good range of Catholic and Christian literature and paraphernalia. Well worth a look.

Obviously, we’ve only just scratched the surface. Do you have your own favourite online store? Help others find out about it – swing by www.catholic.geek.nz and share it with one and all!

There is a pretty good chance that a lot of you reading this column have been thinking about replacing your home PC. The continual drive towards obsolescence of personal computer hardware is part deliberate action by the industry, part the result of continual innovation and improvement in the PC space, and part the result of people not wanting to be stuck with “old gear”.
What are you to do with your old PC when you’re planning to go and buy a new one? Well, first check that you really do need a new PC. It could be that your old PC just feels slow because it is bogged down with everything you’ve put on it over the last three years. Look at investing in an external hard drive and move your old files off the main machine. This will clear up some space and give you room to move.
For serious cases, you can “re-software” your machine. This entails wiping the entire hard drive and starting again using the “restore disks” that came with your PC. Be warned: doing this will wipe absolutely everything on your machine, so only go down this path if you have everything you want to keep backed up.
As a last resort, remember that PCs have hazardous material in them, so throwing them away should only be done on e-Day 2008 when help is on hand. But why throw out what you can donate? DonateNZ is always looking for second-hand material they can give to playcentres and other non-profits who need them.
So, the next time your PC takes too long to boot, have a careful think about which of these remedies you might want to apply to keep the ol’ thing ticking – or to get rid of it in an appropriate manner.