Your photos, music and data are just a virus or hard disk failure away from oblivion. Build a triple-layer defence using PC Authority's practical guide.

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

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

Data recovery is a mystical and varied art that shares much with archaeology. Depending on where you dig for data you may or may not find what you are looking for, and the longer you leave going after your lost data the greater the chance it will be worn away by age and reduced to fragments of its former self.

Unless you keep your computer disconnected from a network and under secure lock and key there will always be the potential for prying eyes to access the data on your hard disk.

PC Authority takes a trip down computer memory lane and discovers just how PC technology has evolved... and how Microsoft and IBM nearly destroyed each other.

Many people upgrade their PCs by adding the latest CPU or more memory, but leave their old hard disk in place. The humble hard disk is one of the slowest components inside a PC (in fact, only optical

BenQ's U-Disk 256MB shares a similar slide-USB port as the SanDisk Cruzer Titanium Labs Winner -- this keeps the unit fairly small and pocket-friendly.

One of the cheapest Vista SSD notebooks we've seen yet, though we're surprised by the benchmark results.

Possibly the most interesting feature of the Xbox is its similarity to a PC in terms of its hardware specification. Unlike other games consoles, like the Sony PlayStation2 and Nintendo GameCube, which

The choice of hard disk will make a huge difference to overall system performance. Due to this, weve taken the advice of our own Labs team and chosen IBMs 30GB DeskStar 75GXP hard disk. Its a common i

If your PC is lacking storage space then give it some extra room with these four internal hard disks.

Samsung’s new Flash disk can extend battery life and boost performance – at a price

The extremely small PQI Travelling Disk 2.0 U190 comes with a large 256MB capacity but at a price around mid-range for the 256MB keys tested.

While hard disk drive speed is commonly one of the last considerations when putting together a new machine, its importance is more than just a place to store your files and operating system.

The two main concerns an end user has with their hard disk, capacity and reliability, continue to improve with advances in technology. Every six months or so, there is an increase in the areal density

Capacity? Value for money? Who's got what? Read on to find out who has the best marriage of both.

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

Smart and easy to use, and can be positioned vertically or horizontally

Shintaro's Pocket Disk is a fairly plain USB key -- it doesn't feature a write-protection switch but it does have password protection -- handy for keeping data safe.