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.

Upgrading and Repairing PCs is now on its 11th Edition, and it just keeps growing.

Still not sure whether it's worth upgrading to Vista? We put XP and Vista through the ultimate face-off.

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.

With Web Standard/Premium, Design Premium AND Macromedia’s products now absorbed into CS3, choosing the right suite is EASY.

Eye-catching and very well designed, the new iMac is an excellent all-in-one PC system.

Whether you're upgrading your existing PC or building one from scratch, the motherboard you choose is of pivotal importance.

Completely wipe a partition or drive

You’ve been asking us for more info about what Intel’s new CPU will mean for those upgrading in the next 12 months. Here’s what you need to know.

Erase & wipe your hard drive

A month's worth of HD news in digest form.

Vulnerabilities could allow unauthorised administrator access.

According to a recent ACCC study, people are jumping on the broad-bandwagon in droves. In fact, the amount of people upgrading to broadband has doubled in the last 12 months. And as you might expect, the hardware community has responded by ramping up both Internet sharing and security devices for homes and businesses.

Disk-imaging software can be put to many varied uses, and products like Drive Image prove particularly useful in our labs when upgrading to a new hard disk or for swiftly refreshing a test system.

Although this board is fairly small on features, such as lacking SATA and FireWire, it does offer a space-saving platform for building a first PC or for upgrading your current system and would make a decent but no frills workhorse.

Not a bad tome to have in the computer room, the PC Repair Bench Book, by R Glister, is geared more towards the beginner tinkerer than the hardcore techie, but it's chock full of good information. Much more descriptive than "Upgrading and repairing PCs" (March 2003, page 63) but without the depth straight away, the PC Repair Bench Book is broken into 10 major sections.

Bundled headphones may not be up to your exacting standards and certainly none cater for listening on planes or trains, so why not consider upgrading to noise-cancelling headphones?

The Techmart SOHO is the only system in this roundup to be supplied with a copy of Windows XP Home rather than XP Professional. This highlights Intermedia's emphasis on the small office, home office environment with this system, where the additional networking features of XP Pro aren't necessary. Even so, it does mean you'll be restricted to using a peer-to-peer network, and you'll need an upgrade if you ever want to set up a client-server system. For the extra $90, it might be worth future-proofing and upgrading to Pro.

Are you kicking around an old clunky PC that looks like a relic from the Stone Age? Google Zeitgeist (www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html) tells us that while Windows XP accounted for 46 percent of the OSs used to search Google during February 2004, 24 percent were still using Windows 98 and Windows 95, indicating there are still a lot of late-1990s PCs kicking around. Even if you’re running something from the 1GHz days, it’s probably time to think about an upgrade. But it can easily get to the point where you’re upgrading just about every component. In that case, you should seriously consider looking at the excellent bargains available in new PCs today.