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.

At Microsoft’s grand unveiling of Office Beta 2, Vista and Longhorn, we ask why it’s being so bullish about this release.

Useful new features and a total interface overhaul make this the best Office ever.

Jon Honeyball gets close to the next bona fide beta of Windows, gets in deep with printer ink coverage and still finds time to buy some new computers.

Get a new Vista installation for the price of an upgrade.

It might seem unfair comparing MYOB’s best selling single user product with Quicken’s multi-user small business accounting package, but the key difference between the two is number of licences and not the functionality.

Consumer PC receive discounted upgrades where premium systems can update at anominal fee.

Impressive and free antivirus and antispyware package

David Moss tackles Vista queries, as well as dealing with floating bars and annoying pop-up reminders.

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.

Software vendor relies on consumer honesty.

Motherboards. The Labs this month is absolutely filled to the brim with them. Not only do we have our massive motherboard Labs, but with all the testing needed for our upgrade feature, the Labs team have been knee deep in components all month. As such, we’ve hereby dubbed this month 'Australian International Month of the Mobo’ in the Labs. Ahh, it all took me back to my Labs days of fiddling with SIMMs, DIMMs and RIMMs, probing BIOSes and hacking the registry to get stubborn drivers and benchmarks to work…

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.

Despite the recent flood of low-priced, high-quality inkjet printers, theres been comparatively little movement on the budget laser front, with Kyoceras FS-1000 (reviewed issue 34, p85) dominating our A-List since September last year.

Impressive and free antivirus and antispyware package

Microsoft’s radical redesign promises ‘better results, faster’. Be fully prepared for this world-leading productivity software.

Free upgrades aim to keep holiday PC sales alive.

Impressive and free antivirus and antispyware package

Impressive and free antivirus and antispyware package