When Intel originally launched the Pentium 4 processor, the market was slow to embrace the new chip. Processor prices were relatively high and the new processor required an entirely new platform. Components all the way down ...

Manufacturers and suppliers of notebooks are sometimes rather too free with their use of the term 'desktop replacement'. They would have us believe that this or that portable PC will simply make a conventional desktop redundant ...

Personal digital assistants (PDAs, or palmtops if you prefer) have come of age. Whatever the operating system they use, these gadgets are now as popular with consumers as they are with the business community. So we've ...

Against all the usual IT norms, digital cameras (which we last reviewed in a group test here) aren't dropping in price. They still start at around £200 and you're still looking at twice that for one ...

It's the time of year, now that Summer is truly upon us, to get down to some serious scanning. Erm, actually, scratch that. If you've got a life it's time to go and sit out at ...

It's well over a year on from the Year 2000 issue and the bug that never was, and many corporate IT managers are now better placed to view the PC market in a much calmer environment, ...

It's nice to dream. If money really were no object and you were going out to buy a new PC, what would you pick? You can now get a really top-spec PC for around £2,000 and ...

At the time, a Pentium III motherboard running at 350MHz may have seemed all you'd ever need, just like 640KB of memory was once 'more than enough'. But things have moved on. It's time to upgrade. ...

It wasn't so long ago that the sub-notebook was thought of as an expensive toy: fine for people doing lightweight work on the move, but of no use for serious business applications. How times have changed. ...

"Graphics! Get your luvverly graphics 'ere... going cheap; 32MB of gigatexel rendering pleasure, just 'alf a donkey to you, madam..." The world of graphics cards is as fast moving as the frame rates of the latest ...

A few years ago, the Swedish car company, Saab, unveiled an experimental prototype car that featured a joystick instead of a steering wheel. Little has been heard of it since. For playing games on your PC ...

Far from dying as a fashion fad, MP3 - the 'renegade' digital music format which makes solid-state music possible through heavy compression - goes from strength to strength. All kinds of new devices keep popping up, ...

Too much hard drive space is never enough. Operating systems and applications seem to double their hard drive footprints on a yearly basis, while even some reference CD-ROMs and games can dump several hundred megabytes of ...

Sound is often an underestimated facet of the PC. Everyone worries about having a graphics card that can shift millions of pixels, a massive hard drive which spins at more RPM than an F1 car on ...

To be honest, this brace of drives barely merits the name 'group test' (we're not even sure if two can really be a group), but we've reviewed these two drives at once because they represent a ...

An LCD screen has always been regarded as one of the ultimate monitors for a desktop PC. In the past, such displays have been expensive, costing almost as much as portable computers, which themselves have LCD ...

Things are hotting up for anyone who fancies buying a pocket-sized palmtop 'personal digital assistant' (PDA) thanks to three recent developments. First, Palm Computing has licensed its award-winning Palm operating system (Palm OS) to recent startup ...

PC prices continue to fall and at each price point you can see better and better technology for your money. You can now get very worthwhile PCs for around £600 plus VAT. Although you have to ...

After 'excessive weight', the most common grumble about notebooks tends to be battery life... or lack of it. This is a problem which just won't go away, and the trend towards faster processors, larger screens, more ...

The digital camera revolution continues, with specifications and results getting closer to those of conventional cameras. Prices are still high, though, with a good quality compact digital camera costing between three and four hundred pounds. Most ...