Some seem to portray a false sense of bravado, hoping perhaps to conceal their inadequacy. We were reminded of this by an article by a journalist, Kieren McCarthy, in The Guardian, which compared computers to “your fat friend at school, lagging behind, slowing you up”.

Declaring himself better at multi-tasking than his PC, McCarthy posed the rhetorical question: "If computers are so fantastic, so amazingly smart and clever, how come I'm so much faster at doing things.

“Even if you give your computer extra RAM, perhaps even splash out on a new, faster hard drive, the same thing eventually happens. Sure, it's delightful for a few weeks. But that's just because of the difference. Before you know it, it is back to its old ways, stuffing its face with data and painfully keeping up the rear."

It seemed to us that it was much more likely that the PC wasn't to blame, and the problems that McCarthy attributed to his computer were self-inflicted. The average personal computer is more adept at multi-tasking than any human, and capable of dispensing with simple jobs like email in a flash.

If your PC is slow, it's more likely to be caused by malware and sloppy housekeeping - the responsibility of the operator – rather than an inherent failing of the technology.

And how often do you find that people who resent technology end up sabotaging themselves through sheer neglect?

It's the ideal time, of course, to examine one's conscience and determine whether we might be suffering from a touch of Kieren McCarthy-ism. Might we, perhaps, adopt safer and more efficient computing practices that will protect us from hackers and data loss, and make our time at the keyboard much more efficient and less stressful?

Might we also, perhaps, swim out of that threatening current, and take charge of our technology? For yet another year, then, Bleeding Edge commits itself to trying to help.

What to do, for instance, if your computer feels slow? You could of course, do a clean install of Windows, or even toss out the PC and buy another, which seems to be a growing phenomenon in the US. Both responses are equally drastic, in our view.

The first thing to do is to check your system for malware – remote-access Trojans, viruses or spyware that might have found their way into your PC, particularly if you haven’t kept your operating system, Web browser and anti-virus program and definitions up to date, or failed to install anti-spyware programs. Or perhaps you’ve neglected to use a firewall, or been accepting pop-up invitations to buy software, or clicking on unknown email attachments. Your first New Year’s resolution should be to correct those dangerous habits.

You can learn how to keep Microsoft software up to date here.

In relation to anti-virus packages, we were less than impressed by Google’s recent bundling of Norton anti-virus in its software pack. They’d have been far better to include a free anti-virus package like the open source ClamWin, or AVG.

You should install and maintain a couple of anti-spyware programs as a matter of course. Microsoft’s free beta anti-spyware should be one of them. Also on that site, you’ll find some information on avoiding remote-access Trojans.

We also recommend Spybot Search & Destroy (safer-networking.org), and perhaps Ad-Aware SE (lavasoft.com). Keep them up to date.

If you find your browser home page has been re-directed, you should run the free browser hijack tool cwshredder.

Even if you use a hardware firewall built in to your broadband modem (recommended), you should still run a software firewall – but not the Windows XP free firewall. Our pick is the free version of ZoneAlarm at tinyurl.com/8cbas

If Windows is slow to boot up, you should look for programs that might have been placed in your Startup folder without your knowledge. You can learn how to fix that at tinyurl.com/uatw

Another potential cause of instability in Windows XP can be overcome by running the Windows System File checker. From the Run menu, type in sfc /scannow.

Windows XP can also be accelerated by a number of tweaks. We’ve always liked O’Reilly Publisher’s Windows Annoyances, and we’ve just found a free chapter from the latest in that series on optimising Windows.

Take all those steps, and you might find that 2006 becomes the year in which you learned to love technology.