I have a fantastic piece of software on my Mac called MacSpeech Dictate. It’s a speech recognition programme very much like – and owned by the same company as – the famous Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

MacSpeech is everything that voice recognition wasn’t years ago – it works, it’s reliable and it really makes it possible to dictate letters and emails as if you had an old-style secretary.

A few weeks ago I got an email from Nuance, the Massachusetts-based firm that owns both products, to say it was upgrading MacSpeech into a new programme called Dragon Dictate, and for £39.99 (€47) I could now enjoy much-enhanced voice recognition.

It was about 7.30am. Barely pausing for thought, I clicked on ‘buy’. Early morning is a vulnerable time for me as far as upgrading software is concerned. I have a feeling others may be the same, since all the upgrade and update offers you get seem to come in overnight.

Anyway, I upgraded. And as a result, found myself freefalling in confusion for the rest of the day. Nuance had made a couple of rare, for them, boo-boos with the upgrade, which left me confused, frustrated and increasingly angry.

There was a further week of intermittent mild irritation before I had sorted out all the issues, vented at a variety of tech staff at the company and got the (great) new Dragon Dictate working fully. Nuance has sorted the problems out now, it seems.

But why did I spend £39.99 on something I had no idea if I needed, only to find it came with a bonus pack of irritation at no extra cost?

The original programme was working perfectly. And there was nothing listed in the enhancements to the new product that I had been particularly yearning for. I’m happy with the new product. But I was happy with the old product.

This strange behaviour is all down to a syndrome I now call cyberchondria – the obsessive desire to stop all work, conversation and, often, breathing too until I have downloaded the absolutely latest version of every bit of software on my computers – even the stuff I never use.

Now I’m certain that this is a male thing. I don’t know a woman whose computer isn’t like a rubbish dump full of, in their case, dangerously out-of-date or otherwise toxic software. But most guys like to run a tidy ship.

Cyberchondria is like that thing you get when the car isn’t running right. Again, if you’re a woman, you will have no idea what I mean by this, but, guys, you know what I’m talking about. It’s impossible to feel 100% okay about life if the car has a problem. It’s far worse than if a member of the family (apart from yourself) is feeling a little unwell.

Knowing that a really, really important part of your computer – not just the voice recognition, but your Microsoft Office suite, your web browser or (heaven forbid) your Windows or Mac operating system, is not updated to within the last five minutes provokes the worst attacks of cyberchondria. Yet if you click on the button to see the detail of what the update is, it will rarely be anything that merits the full-on condition.

It’s more often a slightly improved driver for a printer you don’t own and never will than a crucial security patch without which Osama bin Laden and a thousand Nigerian scammers will be reading your personal documents over their breakfast.

There is no fix for cyberchondria. I’ve tried and failed to be cool about the free upgrades Microsoft, Apple, Norton et al hand out almost every week.

What I will be doing (and doubtless failing at) in future, though, is trying to ask myself when money is being solicited for an upgrade, whether I will ever, honestly, miss it if I give it a miss.