Batteries. I think my family has an addiction to them. Nasty, horrible, polluting little things that they are.

Every few days, they come to me for their latest fix. "Dad, the Wii remote needs a battery". "The Xbox controller isn’t working". "My watch has stopped".

Okay; if that’s the only addiction they develop I’ll be a happy man. But wow, sometimes it gets really old!

Rechargeables are, of course, the answer. But you never have a set charged at the moment they ask for batteries for something, and it’s just so much easier to go and get a set of fresh ones out of the kitchen cupboard.

But the one at the top is the real kicker. It was taken out of my parents’ PC. That PC was reporting all sorts of errors that would be quite alarming if you didn’t know what caused them:

"Configuration data invalid"

"Clock error"

"BIOS Setup Invalid – Reset to defaults?"

I have been known people to replace complete PCs, just because of these errors. All for a £2 battery. Why does a modern PC rely on something so shabby as a watch battery?

Pah!