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.

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.

The Centrino platform has just received a major revision. Tim Dean peers inside Sonoma and takes a look at what we can expect.

Buying a mid-range Dell notebook now means a choice between Dell's Inspiron, Studio and XPS notebooks. We examine the value.

In this line of work, there's really nothing quite like the all-too-occasional experience of opening a box from Apple, and unveiling the shiny wonders squirreled away inside. In fact, it's the only event that never fails to draw all and sundry AJB staff from throughout the office into the Labs to catch a glimpse of what the tech company with only 3 percent market share worldwide has managed to innovate this time.

Lenovo has announced two performance workstation models in the ThinkStation range, the D10 and the S10.

Shuttle's push on the small form factor market has seen the PC finally migrate from the bedroom to become an integral part of the lounge room and entertainment set up. Capable of a number of varied roles, these include file servers, HDTV receiving boxes and media streaming machines.

VIA has dominated the AMD arena the last couple of years, and its latest offering is the KT400 chipset, which despite its name, only officially handles DDR333 memory. Many boards however do have limited support for DDR400, as well as AGP 8x.

System-on-a-chip component should see prices plummet.

Physically similar to the Scorpion Z-Box system with its black anodised midi tower, this unit also features a pair of both front-mounted audio 3.5mm sockets and USB ports, perfect for quick plug and play of both bus and externally powered devices such as keyboards, printers, joysticks and removable USB pen drives.

An HDMI-equipped board ideal for small media-centre systems

ATI gives the integrated graphics world a kick in the arse, John Gillooly feels the vibrations.

Shuttle is a bit of a pioneer in the world of barebones PCs, and is one of few manufacturers to have a range of systems on offer and not just a couple of basic units. Its also the only one in this roundup to offer a barebones based around the new Athlon 64.

It's not big, but it's brave - powered by the Intel Pentium 4 2.66GHz processor, the classy looking Beyond Avrora was not afraid to show its muscles, scoring very well in office related tasks.

Squeeze that extra bit of power out of your existing hardware. Tim Dean looks at the principles of overclocking and examines the potential performance increase.

DDR2 is here, but there's more to it than meets the eye. Tim Dean takes a look at the good and bad of tomorrow's memory.

Several PC makers expect to have Nehalem-EX 16-core DP desktops, in fact super workstations, at the chip's launch towards year-end

With so many factors to consider, choosing a motherboard can be a bewildering exercise. We put 11 models through their pace to find the ultimate in performance, flexibility and value

Will splashing out on expensive RAM make a real difference to PC performance? And if so, how much should you buy? We supply the benchmarks and lay the details bare