In general, more gadgets are better than fewer gadgets, but there is one exception: remote controls!

I have six remotes, controlling TV, Tivo, DVD, VCR, Xbox and camcorder - and that's way more clutter than I want around me. So I went looking for a universal remote ...

There are universal remotes available at all price ranges, from around a tenner to well over £500!

At the bottom level, you have remotes with physical buttons that are set up by entering codes for the make & model of each piece of kit. There is no flexibility at all in how they work. These are available for £10-70. If you're looking for one of these, the One-for-All Chameleon works well and has a cool blue glow into the bargain (we have one of these in Germany).

The next level up is a touchscreen remote with fixed button sizes and positions. You can change the functions and labels, and sometimes choose which buttons are displayed, but that's as far as it goes. I started with one of these, but they really don't offer the flexibility required to make a truly personalised remote. I bought mine in the States and was able to sell it here for slightly more than I paid for it - which is always nice. :-) These cost around £60-100.

Go up a level and you get a fully-configurable touchscreen. You can choose how many screens you have, and you can create whatever design, layout, buttons, labels and functionality you desire. A button can be any size or shape you like - it can even be a custom-created graphic. Reading the reviews, and asking around, the Philips Pronto series seemed to be the best of these. These cost around £200.

At the very top of the tree are colour versions. These are absolutely lovely, but typically cost over £500. I am willing to spend money on lovely gadgets, but I draw the line at that kind of money for a remote-control!

I thus opted for a mono Philips Pronto: the RU940. This is, for those old enough to remember them, about the size of a cassette walkman. It has a large touchscreen, and seven physical buttons. Five of the physical buttons are labelled, but all seven are fully configurable:

There is a large IR transmitter at the top of the unit, and a small receiver at the bottom so that it can learn the commands from any remote.

There are three different ways of configuring the Pronto. At the most basic level, you can use the built-in configuration and simply teach it the commands for your remotes. To do this, you select Learn mode, press a button on the Pronto, point your existing remote at it and press the corresponding button. The Pronto then learns that infra-red code and assigns it to the correct on-screen button.

The second option is to design your screens on a PC. You can download a free copy of Pronto Edit from the Philips website, and use the gallery of buttons and layouts to create your screens. You can also download code-sets for a lot of standard kit, to avoid the need to teach the Pronto button-by-button.

The user-interface of the PC software is appalling, but once you finally get used to it, you can create a screen in around 10 minutes. If you haven't been able to find code-sets for your kit, you connect the Pronto to the PC via a serial cable (see note below) and then tell the software to learn each infra-red command. This is done button-by-button in much the same way as above.

You can create bitmap images in graphics software and then use them as either backgrounds or buttons. Some very sophisticated layouts can thus be created - in time!

The lazy, like me, will go for option 3: download somebody else's configuration file from the net (these are known as CCF files). There is an excellent selection of these at the Remote Central website. The direct link to the files for black-and-white remotes is here. The Philips TS-1000 files are compatible with the RU-940.

However, unless you are incredibly lucky, you won't find anyone with the exact same mix of equipment. You will thus have to rejig their files to suit, but starting with someone else's layout still gives you a great-looking result in a fraction of the time it would take you to create your own.

It has to be said that the Star Trek theme is rather prevalent, which gives a somewhat worrying insight into the core market for these types of remote. But I can get away with using a ST motif if I claim to be doing so in an ironic fashion, right?

The particular one I opted for suited me well, as I like as many functions as possible in as few screens as possible, and will accept small buttons as the price to pay. You can download the original version here (many thanks to Georg Fischer for creating it).

The main menu, with all my devices listed (as well as direct access to the AV buttons that switch the TV to the appropriate SCART socket for Tivo, Xbox or CCTV camera):

An example of a device screen, in this case for my Tivo:

As I say, my preference is for fewer screens with more functions, hence the somewhat cramped layout. But you can set things up however you like - like this example from the opposite end of the spectrum:

Once you have everything configured the way you want it, a single-click transfers the CCF file to the Pronto. This also means that if the Pronto ever crashes or is lost/broken, you can reload from the PC to restore everything.

The Pronto has some weaknesses. First, as I've mentioned, the Pronto Edit software is really, really bad. It's so bad, I'm going to say it yet again: it really, really sucks.

For example, when you create a new screen (what the software calls a 'Panel'), you can have a customisable snap-to grid to make it easy to align the buttons. But the grid configuration isn't saved, so every time you reopen the same panel to edit it, you have to reconfigure the grid! And all your work on a panel is saved automatically, which sounds like a good thing but isn't: if you make a mistake, you can't undo it by abandoning the edit and starting again.

The software also falls over regularly. Not in a fatal way, but it will suddenly decide to stop opening buttons, so you have to close the panel, re-open it (and recreate your grid, as above).

The link to the Pronto also fails randomly, and it often takes two or three attempts to learn a new button code. It claims to have learnt it, so you can only find out by testing it - though you can at least do this from within the software (which sends the code via the Pronto).

But you soon get over these failings when you have the finished result. I've been able to reduce six remotes to one, and been able to configure that one to work exactly the way I want it to. So, overall, I recommend it. Just don't start using the PC software at midnight ...