I've been lucky enough to escape the cold, damp weather here in Britain for some of the summer, heading off to a delightful small town just north of Rome in Italy where it was sunny and warm.

We stayed in a tiny house that was at least four hundred years old with a bathroom that was actually a cave. It was just up the road from a medieval monastery and a really nice bar that was open all hours.

The house may have been old, but it came with one very useful modern convenience: wifi. There was an internet connection and a wireless router so that we could get online on a fast, reliable connection.

I'm the sort of person who takes his laptop everywhere, so it was great for me to be able to keep up with email, update my Facebook status and do all the other online stuff I do.

I even took the time to copy my photos from my digital camera and send them off to an online picture-sharing site so all my friends could look enviously at the great time I was having.

But it seems to me that holiday wireless is also really useful for people who do actually take proper holidays, the ones where they don't do any work and don't phone the office.

For example, more and more tourist information is available online, so if you want to know when the local museum is open, or what time the trains run to the nearest city, you can find out on the web.

Online maps mean you can look at the local area to see if there's anything of interest nearby.

And of course if you need a doctor or a chemist then the web is going to be more help than an out-of-date list in the information file left by the landlord.

You don't even need to lug your laptop abroad for this to be useful.

A lot of people have small computers, called PDAs or 'personal digital assistants', that come with wifi and can be used to surf the web or read emails.

And many modern mobile phones have wifi built in, so you can connect to the wireless network in your holiday home instead of having to pay vast amounts of money to your phone provider.

It also makes life easier in another way, as I saved a small fortune by calling home using the Skype internet phone service from my laptop instead of using my mobile.

Next year I'll definitely be looking to rent somewhere that comes with wireless included.

When you buy a new computer and connect it to the Internet the first thing that it will do is to copy and install a whole load of updated files and programs from various websites.

This is true whether you use Windows, Macintosh or even the free Linux operating system.

There's a good reason for this. In the days or weeks (or even months) since the manufacturer put the computer together there will have been lots of changes to the programs that it comes supplied with.

Most of them will fix newly-discovered security problems, although some may be improved versions of programs that are faster or have more features.

Unfortunately that's not the end of the fun. Almost every day new problems are found and fixed, new versions are released and new stuff becomes available.

Yet it seems that lots of us are failing to keep up to date. Researchers at Google and IBM did some reasearch with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and found that large numbers of people have old web browsers, even though they may be full of security holes.

The browser is the program you use to look at web pages, and there are lots to choose from including Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Apple's Safari, Opera and Firefox.

Over four in ten people were using an old version of Internet Explorer, even though Windows has a tool to let you update it automatically. And around one in five of us have an old version of Firefox despite the warnings it gives you to get the latest one from their website.

And this is happening even though the updates are free.

One idea from the researchers is to put a 'best before date' on programs, just like the ones on sausages. They reckon that we'd all understand this and make an effort to stay up to date.

Of course another problem is that the computers in offices, libraries and school are centrally managed so users have to wait for the authorities to install new versions.

But anyone with a computer at home should make sure they stay up to date.

Windows update

Mac OS update