INSTEAD of barring entry to students and under 18s, the organisers of this week's Windows World 96 computer exhibition at the RDS might have been better off banning mobile phones. Throughout the hall there was a constant chirp chirp of ringing phones and babble of those special voices that are only used for mobile conversations: "Yaw, yaw, OK, goforrit!"

The most amusing conversations were those on the stands, where exhibitors' staff seemed to be continuing their role in customer support over their mobiles. There was more than one snatch of "OK, now choose `have disk' and put in the driver disk - ... you do have the disk, don't you?" or better still: "Well we have an out on this one... he never said it was Windows 95."

The latter was delivered with a note of triumph guaranteed to make any potential customer think twice.