It is the sort of thing the committed road warrior dreams of doing, but late the next day, he felt the first twinges of pain in the outside of his hands. Over the next few days the pain travelled up his forearms, to his shoulder and his back. After a couple of weeks, he had to severely cut back on his work.

Within a month he could not type. He was also incapable of twisting a door handle. He had difficulty sleeping, couldn't exercise, and even sitting in a chair for any length of time was painful.

His specialist told him he was suffering from an ``impingement" on a nerve at the top of his spine. It was something that often happened, he said, to people who spent long hours at a desk. Our friend had been a touch-typist for 20 years, ignoring - as we all tend to do - those warnings about taking frequent breaks for stretching. It was a long and painful nightmare. Our friend spent several thousand dollars on a Therapod chair, with arm rests and adjustable back support. He bought a $1200 DataHand keyboard, a $160 Microsoft thumb-operated trackball, an adjustable table and a book support. As the effects worsened, he'd become incapable of holding a book open.

To allow him to do more of his work standing up he spent another $300 on a Doro cordless hands-free phone.

He bought a copy of IBM's ViaVoice speech recognition software but although it transcribed his sentences with few errors he found he couldn't use it to do things such as surfing the web. The manual told him that commands like ``Go to address" and ``Click hyperlink" would work. They didn't.

The dictionary didn't include a lot of technical terms that he used quite often. He tried using the "analyse documents" command, which in theory sets the program to scan your documents and add any missing words to the dictionary. That didn't work either.

Bleeding Edge was reviewing the latest release of Dragon's Naturally Speaking, Version 7, and we thought it might solve his problems. We included him in the review process.

He didn't have a chance to look at it until the day he flew to Noosa for a few weeks of recuperation. Somewhat forbiddingly, he was in precisely the same situation that had brought on his problem - in fact, somewhat worse, given that he wasn't in business class this time. Domestic cattle class is not the best environment for working on a notebook.

But although he could scarcely hear the flight attendant over the sound of the engines, Dragon Naturally Speaking gave the "acoustic environment" 20 out of 20 - probably because he was using a noise-cancelling headset. Because it uses a dictionary that's been modified for Australian vowel sounds, it was even better at recording his dictation, and it successfully analysed his documents - extracting 2000 new words from 4000 of his sent emails. Within days he was "typing" at 100 words a minute, without touching a key.

Two months later, he's become an evangelist for Dragon Naturally Speaking. The program, and the trackball in particular, got him back to work. In his view, all of us should be using it, rather than risking injury.

It's far better, however, to avoid this sort of injury in the first place. If you plan on using a laptop for prolonged periods, you should get an external keyboard and mouse and monitor, or alternatively use one of those brilliant laptop stands that Dell, and more recently Targus and Kensington among other have been selling. Take care the laptop is properly secured though, because another friend recently found his 17-inch PowerBook on the floor, having somehow come adrift from the stand.

And be careful not to put any strain on your elbow when you use the mouse. That might mean using a narrower keyboard, so your arm isn't extended too far to the side. We run ours over our thigh.