A few weeks ago we asked for your eBay stories, and we’ve received a lot of responses about bad sellers, demanding buyers and more.

Blu-ray writers are more affordable than ever. We look at four internal models to find the best way to go high-def. The last time we did a round-up of optical drives, the former war was in full swing. But now Blu-ray has at last seen off HD DVD and taken its place as the industry standard for high-capacity optical media.

Sony announced it would no longer import CRT computer screens into Australia, instead focusing its efforts on the more lucrative and rapidly growing LCD market.

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.

Battery Extender claims to offer 30 per cent boost.

PC-cillin is no longer just an anti-virus program - it is a full internet security suite that includes a personal firewall and spam filtering - and it costs between $20 and $40 less than the equivalent Norton product.

The future, they say, is based on the Internet and mobile computing.

Small form factor PCs have been around for a while, and barebones PCs for even longer. Traditionally a barebones PC is a basic shell, including a case, power supply and motherboard at minimum, and occasionally tooled up with a few extras like RAM.

Professional Web designers will frequently mix and match applications from two or more developers. It seems it is no longer good enough to bundle several applications together to form a single solutio

Canon typically puts out a good digital video camera and for a while had the market fairly well sown up. However, there is now plenty of competition and Canon can no longer just rely on its reputation to keep it at the top. The MVX250i is a mid range camera designed for average users who want something more than the bare basics. Its 860,000 pixel (effective) CCD provides a good quality picture in most cases, including in night mode. However, it can be slow to find a good colour balance.

Despite the obvious advantages associated with working at home - autonomy, the power to set your own hours, increased job satisfaction, and so on, it's still not an activity that suits everyone. Disad

Despite the obvious advantages associated with working at home - autonomy, the power to set your own hours, increased job satisfaction, and so on, it's still not an activity that suits everyone. Disad

A suite with some nice features but slow startup times made us disappointed with ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite 2009

Whereas a couple of years ago Canon might have described this as a mini camcorder, it now describes it as a compact multimedia DV camera. Certainly by comparison with the others in this month's labs it's not mini, however it does manage to pack a lot of features into a relatively small package. It is an upright camera rather than the longer, squatter shape of the MVX250i and weighs 43 grams less than its bigger but cheaper brother.

Set time aside to check email, say researchers.

New bandwidth and storage headaches.

It's a sign of the times when Compaq's Aero 8000 runs Windows CE in a box bigger than a Sharp PC-A250 (reviewed issue 23, p86) running Windows 98. So what's the big idea? Windows CE uses no moving parts, while software in ROM means immediate start-up times, high reliability, and long battery life all highly desirable qualities in a portable.

Sun UltraSPARC In 1995, eight years after the first SPARC Station was introduced, Sun went 64-bit with the debut of its UltraSPARC I RISC processor; the first model ran at 143MHz and had 128-bi

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.

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.