The processor struggle continues between AMD and Intel as the war rages on for the top ranking of the market share table. Interestingly enough, of the four machines this month under the $2,500 price tag, Scorpion Technology's Z-Box was the only unit to feature an AMD Althon XP processor. Also interesting was the marginal gains achieved by Intel given their obvious clock speed advantages over this unit.

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.

Your PC is only as good as your last upgrade, and this is truer than ever with current gaming and software applications milking machines for everything they're worth.

While this system may not be the highest performer overall in the group, it still represents very good value for money, as demonstrated by its above average 112 Value score.

Impressive and free antivirus and antispyware package

A few quirks can’t detract from the fact that this system is fast and good value

The notebooks were subjected to several benchmarks to give an objective evaluation of their speeds, performance and applicability.

One of LG Electronics’ first three notebooks has been withheld from release to the Australian market.

We never thought we’d see it happen, but now you can run Windows XP natively on a Mac.

New models avoid the el cheapo tag, and it's probably a good thing if you're planning on running Vista.

Apple’s ads may be funny, but they’re woefully inaccurate. Here we reveal dozens of reasons why the PC outclasses the Mac.

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

Climb the steps all the way to Windows guru status with our invaluable selection of tips and shortcuts for XP and Vista.

The entire industry is moving towards dual-core technology, but why? Tim Dean looks at some of the reasons for the shift.

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

We've put both mini-notebooks through their paces, and while Linux fans may disagree, the winner is clear.

Where's the #@$%? Device Manager in Windows Vista? Steve Polak exlains how to find all the system settings you know from Windows XP, in the sometimes confusing Vista interface.

You've been raising some big questions in the forums about 64-bit. Here's our FAQ to 64-bit Vista vs XP, and whether it's worth the hassle if you're not a workstation user, but a gamer or power user.