To kick-start the series we're going to begin, as it were, at the top – with the fine art of motherboard and CPU installation. Whether you're building your machine anew, or upgrading your current one with more powerful components, the following guide will help make installing these two key components a breeze.

An old PC is like putty in your hands. Tim Dean looks at how you can shape it into a new system with a few easy upgrades.

From budget laptops to ultra-tiny netbooks, ultraportables and high performance, we explain the tricks to finding out the ultimate laptop at the right price.

All the acronyms and obscure new technologies got you in a jargon jumble? Tim Dean busts it up to help us make sense of it all.

Squeeze that extra bit of power out of your existing hardware. Tim Dean looks at the principles of overclocking and examines the potential performance increase.

Choosing a CPU for your PC isn’t an easy task. Here are our picks for budget, mid-range and high-end systems.

We've put AMD and Intel’s new processors to the test, and there's one clear winner.

Want to perform an extreme makeover of your system's motherboard, processor, memory or hard disk? We'll show you how.

What happens when multiple-core processors are no longer sufficient for our demands? Stuart Andrews looks at the future of CPUs.

Looking to build your dream machine? We explore the latest components on the market, and give you advice on which ones to hunt down, along with the general price you can expect to pay for each major component.

Run Windows apps on Linux by running Windows itself. Leigh Dyer shows you how.

Prepare to say goodbye to the Pentium as we reveal the next generation

We test the big three OSes on level ground - Boot Camp.

Leigh Dyer arrives in OS heaven with a triple-booting Intel Mac.

Last year the Pentium 4 was beginning to show its true colours as a top performance desktop CPU, but it was still squarely outmatched in the value stakes by the new Athlon processor. DDR RAM was also becoming the standard, with SDRAM finally going the way of the extinct plankton, graptolites.

Curious to see what powers the Nehalem and Core i7 architecture? We reveal the tech behind the fastest Intel-powered computer on the planet.

Every expert has a toolkit. Tim Dean takes you through the 10 tools any Windows expert cannot live without. So, to give you a head start, here are PC Authority's top 10 tools for the ultimate Windows user.

Thought Core 2 was the only choice? Think again... AMD's far from dead.

Nvidia’s latest graphics cards and chips throw down the gauntlet to Intel and AMD. Go behind the scenes with this guide to the big technologies including PhysX, CUDA, and games like Far Cry 2 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R Clear Sky.

Sun UltraSPARC In 1995, eight years after the first SPARC Station was introduced, Sun went 64-bit with the debut of its UltraSPARC I RISC processor; the first model ran at 143MHz and had 128-bi