If you have your TV playing through your surround speakers, your Sky+ digibox plugged in and your DVD player and video recorder set up, then Microsoft would like to talk to you.

They have just announced Media Center (yes, it’s American!), a way to bring all your ‘digital entertainment’ together in on place, and they think it’s really cool.

So cool that they are spending vast amounts of money advertising it in computer stores and elsewhere in the hope that we’ll all rush out and buy one when they hit the shops later this year.

The media centre is basically a powerful PC with a special version of the Windows XP operating system.

It has a fast internet connection, a TV tuner so you can plug cable or satellite into the back, and a big hard drive to store TV programmes on, just like a Sky+ digibox.

You can plug it into your TV to watch the programmes on a proper screen instead of your computer monitor.

Or you can use it as a PC and just watch TV or movies in a window on screen while you surf the web or write your letters.

It also plugs into your surround sound system so you don’t have to put up with tinny PC speakers any more.

This means you can download music from the internet, or copy your CDs to your computer, and listen to all of your music whenever you want.

Of course, having a big grey PC sitting next to your widescreen TV wouldn’t appeal to anyone.

So media centre PCs will look more like DVD players or amplifiers, designed to fit in the living room.

They even come with a remote control so you can get rid of the keyboard and mouse if you want, at least when you’re watching TV.

All in the living room!

This isn’t the first time that a computer company has tried to persuade us that we all need PCs in the living room to bring all our different forms of entertainment together.

But we’ve managed to resist them until now, perhaps because we don’t see the point.

After all, the TV, the stereo and the PC are used for different things at different times.

Perhaps the main problem is that PCs still tend to crash rather too often, but TVs don’t.

And the web is still a lot less reliable than a TV channel – when was the last time that you got a ‘server not available’ message when you wanted to watch BBC1?

Some people – the ones who bought a DVD player when they cost £1000 – will want the latest toys to play with.

But the rest of us might be better off waiting until they’re a lot cheaper – and we know they work – before we follow them.

Do you watch telly and surf?
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My daughter is in her second year of secondary school, and she’s just started using her school’s private website, or ‘intranet’, to keep track of homework and stay in touch with her friends.

She can get copies of assignments and even send her completed work to teachers.

One of the nice things about the site is that only children can use it, and they have to have a username provided by the school, so it’s pretty safe.

However we rapidly discovered a problem when she tried to write a short introduction to herself for her classmates to read.

She filled in the necessary on-screen form and clicked on the button to save it.

But instead she got an error message in red, telling her that she had used inappropriate words and her entry would not be posted.

After some trial and error we discovered that the objectionable word was ‘spot’ – she had written ‘I don’t have lots of spots.’

The word ‘zit’ was blocked too.

However we changed ‘spot’ to ‘sp$t’ and there was no problem!

This sort of inept censorship worries me a lot.

First, because it was unreasonable my daughter simply didn’t respect it and tried to find a way around it.

Second, because it was so poorly done, getting round it was easy.

If her school really cared about this sort of stuff they’d do a better job by getting a real person to read each entry.

Then they wouldn’t be fooled by ‘sp$t’ – but they probably wouldn’t have objected to ‘spot’ in the first place.

Have your kids been using their school's 'intranet'?
Click here to have your say!