A Merry Christmas to all readers of The Independent, and the brave souls that pile through this column.

May your internet searches lead to webpages you actually want to see, and the links you click on to websites that exist. May you wriggle free of any phishing lines, and be sure to practice safe email with good virus protections.

May your downloads be delicious, and don't forget to take a good long defrag over the holidays. Watch out for bloatware, or you might need to urgently uninstall. Don't byte off more than you can chew, and watch out for the spam. If something seems WiFi, it probably is.

May your short-term memory grow, and your speed increase in parallel. Set your refresh rate as high as possible, and be sure to view richly in all the colours you can. Treat your peripherals nicely, and interface with them flexibly. Give any serial pests the boot and tell them to blog off. Keep your communications channels open, and make sure you are using the right standards.

Be careful to use a designated driver or better yet use the system bus, sorry, bus system. If you feel a bit CD after a night of indulgence, beta take a browse through your cabinet and plugin a tab. Hibernate and take it easy-PC for a while.

If you choose an open source for a Christmas barbeque, make sure you have a good firewall and if the garden lawns are too long, modem. If you can, keep a broadband of clearance all round. And wear a Red Hat to get into the spirit of things.

On LAN or in the air, have a peaceful celebration. Merry Christmas.