I'll tell you one excellent reason to opt for a Macintosh computer rather than a PC at the moment: Internet connections. And I don't mean because it is easier to set up to access the Net, although many people cite this as a major plus. You just stand a much better chance of getting online faster, and on your first try, when you dial up your Internet service provider.

This is simply a modem issue. Down at your ISP, there is equipment set up to take calls from modems in Macs and there is equipment set up to take calls from modems in PCs. Far fewer people are using Macs than PCs (maybe 10 per cent overall) and that means that when you dial up your ISP - bingo.

This, at least, was my experience over the past two months, when I was using my old Mac Performa constantly, while waiting to receive delivery of a new PC. Dialing in to my ISP with my old PC over the previous year has been driving me to despair, since I rarely seem to get an immediate connection and have had to ring back four or five times. Often, halfway through the tedious user name and password verification process, I lose the line completely and have to dial again.

This happens with a number of ISPs that I use from time to time. I've contacted my main ISP several times; each time it has told me the all-too-usual tech helpdesk line: the problem must be at my end; it has plenty of modems and it shouldn't take so many tries. Perhaps it's Microsoft's standard program, Dial-Up Networking, that is causing the problem, or the time of day when I'm phoning in. But this week, it happened at 7:30 a.m. and it happened at 2 a.m. I doubt that the State has a huge surge in Net use at 2 a.m. on a Monday night.

I have used three different PCs in the past year and all have this problem. Then I fire up the old Mac and not only do I get an immediate connection on the first try, every single time, but it zaps through the verification process in seconds, not half a minute or more. This clearly has some elements of better software design to do with it, but Irish ISPs don't seem to be giving particularly good service in terms of the number of PC-based Internet users they can handle at one time. Getting back on the Mac reminded me of what proper service should be - and used to be.

As for the helpdesks - God help the new computer users trying to get online for the first time and seeking guidance, who will only end up more baffled than when they started. This "start first by blaming the user" approach is utterly exasperating, particularly for the completely inexperienced computer user.

The recent announcement that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) would increase the number of top-level domain addresses on the Internet received a rather misguided response by some organisations here. ICANN is the somewhat beleaguered body that now handles much of the administrative and management work of the Web. Many people don't like it because it has started charging for administrative tasks that used to be free.

Top-level domains are the part of a Web address that comes at the end: .com, .org, .net or country identifiers like .ie. For some time, people have known we would need more top-level domains because many addresses - particularly those using the popular .com suffix - are now gone. Plus, .com doesn't tell you much about what kind of a .com it might be.

So some new ones have been proposed, such as .store and .travel. The idea is that if you are a Johnny-come-lately to the Web and didn't get your .com address when it was still around, you now have the chance to grab it. Some organisations were greeting this solution as a huge boon to Irish companies, who could now all rush to get the domain that reflects their names.

But it would be hard for a legitimate Irish company not to get the domain associated with its name, since the .ie domain is tightly controlled. If the European Union brings in a .eu domain, as it has proposed, than other options will be available as well. I know that many companies prefer the .com address because it is not tied to a particular location (useful if a company prefers not to be seen as "just an Irish company"), but there's little that can be done to increase the availability of .com addresses.

And I think .store and other new domains will be seen as second-tier in desirability, anyway, much as .net and .org are (at least, by those who are using such domains as a default because they couldn't get the .com version). Both .org and .net were supposed to have had very specific uses - for public organisations and for organisations involved with Internet administration respectively.