Everything you need to know about maxing-out your broadband connection, including interleaving, fine tuning MTU settings, firmware updates, ADSL filters and splitters,and that old chestnut - electrical noise in your wiring

Stack your system full of software without paying a penny, with our guide to essential downloads

A new way forward for ultraportables, combining an incredible low weight with unrivalled ergonomic excellence

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

Apple’s new wonder notebook saddles up to ultraportable, style specialists Sony. But who wins the first impressions contest?

Dell's 6400 is a great value mid-range notebook with very few weaknesses. The support is the icing on the cake.

A rock-solid and fully kitted-out laptop for the demanding worker.

Sony does it again with a Notebook to die for.

While many ultraportable laptops, like the Toshiba R200 go all out to get size and weight to an absolute minimum, a great deal of usability is often sacrificed – the X505 is impractically small for constant daily usage while the R200 has limited battery sizes.

Plenty of modern phones support email, of course, but what always made BlackBerry special was its push technology. With this, you don't need to dial up to collect your email: just sit back and wait for the messages to come to you. Wherever you are, if an urgent email comes through to any of your email addresses -- and the 7100v supports up to 10 -- you can act on it instantly.

When Dell shook the Pocket PC world with the aggressively priced Axim X5 (March 2003, page 41), its rivals could always point out that the X5 was bulkier and uglier than their devices. With its latest Axim, however, Dell has produced a slimmer, more attractive model without compromising on spec, features or price.

Sony never lets you forget that it creates Personal Entertainment Organisers; Personal Data Assistants simply aren't trendy enough. But if you ignore the marketing, it rapidly becomes clear that the TJ35 is going head-to-head with the supposedly business-oriented Palm Tungsten E (January 2004, cover CD).

The iPAQ's evolution is almost complete. The first signs came with the H1940, a Pocket PC that finally managed to be good looking, tiny and powerful - and it even included Bluetooth. But the H4150, while looking rather similar, makes the H1940 look almost Stone Age, with HP squeezing WLAN into the package, upping the processor speed to 400MHz and improving the screen still further.

This rather optimistic time assumes no use of the backlight, but we found half-brightness to offer the best compromise – and even at this setting, the V35's screen impresses.

If there was a PDA king, this would be it. HP includes everything in the iPAQ H5550 including 802.11b, Bluetooth and fingerprint recognition. Most importantly, this is the first PDA we've seen to run Pocket PC 2003

The Toshiba e740 (review on the PC Authority Web site) boasted great features such as Type II CF and SD/MMC card slots, and the optional expansion pack which includes a VGA output and USB port, allowing the connection of a keyboard and a projector. The e750 goes two steps further. You can now send 16-bit colour to a projector at a resolution of 800 x 600, and this WiFi version connects wirelessly to a suitably equipped Toshiba projector. Another WiFi enhancement is support for Voice-over-IP with an enhanced microphone socket so a microphone headset can be used.

The Zire 71 isn't a business tool. It's not even a straight forward personal organiser. Palm is targeting the ears of Sony's CLIÉ range, the new PDA boasts not only a headphone jack for MP3 player use, but also a 640 x 480 camera. The camera is ingeniously hidden behind the metal backplate. To activate, you simply slide down the backplate to reveal the lens, the screen becoming a viewfinder. You can save photos to the memory – 12.7MB before you start loading programs – or to an SD/MMC card that slips into the top-mounted slot.

Never judge a book by its cover, they say, and nowhere does this apply better than to the Nokia 9210i Communicator.

HP Ipaq

Sony, HP and Handspring had better take note – Palm has just rewritten the PDA rules. Just in time for Christmas, Palm has unleashed a stylish, lightweight and fully featured PDA that blasts the sub-$700 opposition away – by hundreds of dollars.