When system integrators go head-to-head the winners are you and me. Margins get cut and extras get thrown in. That's exactly what's happened between CyberPower and PC Specialist, with the former putting together the i7 Heaven as competition for the latter's Vortex PC. And it's a close run thing. Read TechRadar's PC Specialist Vortex review ...

Back in February, a video clip of a brand new Sony product became an internet must-see. Within hours of its original upload, it became the toast of Twitter, was embedded in endless blogs and was earnestly discussed by some of the technology industry's biggest hitters. Witty, well produced and entirely unofficial, for a brief period of time it...

It's not controversial to state that pretty much no one likes the PSP's UMD drive, but it might raise eyebrows to suggest that Sony itself was never that into the whole tiny optical disk concept. That's the conclusion to be drawn from an interview given to Japanese website GameBusiness by Naoya Matsui, who heads up the Sony...

We all love performance hardware; that's why we're here and that's why you're here. And that's why we all went weak at the knees over the first Core i7 and why we're blown away by the latest spin of the i7-920. But in real terms, it's still a niche market. Which is why AMD's Phenom II CPUs have...

It’s easy to be cynical about Philips’ Aurea TVs. After all, shouldn’t a TV be more about picture and sound quality than having loads of brightly-coloured flashing lights around its edges? Isn’t the Aurea Light Frame technology merely a marketing trick designed to get the Philips brand more attention at trade shows and appearances on This Morning? readmore»

It wouldn't be a normal week without an iPhone rumour or two, so it's a pleasure to report that Apple itself has fuelled the latest scuttlebutt by filing a patent application for some intriguing new features. The 2 July US filing suggests that future iPhones may include fingerprint recognition in the touchscreen for not just security purposes,...

Even though it's something we all know we should be doing, for many of us, backups aren't carried out often enough. Perhaps one of the biggest reasons for this is a lack of suitable storage media – and that's our topic here. It's not just the hardware that gets in the way, though; the amount of effort it takes to complete the back-up process is also a hindering factor. If your only option is to copy your hard drive onto a stack of 50 CDs, it's not a chore that's going to get done any time soon, or often. The key to data protection is making the back-up process as quick and easy as possible, and thus making sure it gets done frequently. Having storage media of adequate capacity is vital, but equally important is keeping to a minimum the amount of data that has to be backed up. Just your documents?An important consideration is whether to back up your entire system or only data files such as emails, documents, photographs, audio tracks and so on. Backing up an entire system involves disk imaging, which, as the name suggests, makes a copy of everything on your hard disk – data, programs, settings and all. This means that if you use a recent disk image to recover your PC after a crash, it'll look and feel exactly as before. In many ways this sounds like the ideal solution, but inevitably there are some downsides: because you're backing up so much data, the process is slower and you need a larger storage solution.

As old-fashioned CRT television become rapidly redundant and are replaced by LCDs and plasma displays a new problem has arisen in terms of what to do with the bulky old sets. Faced with strict recycling laws in many countries, Panasonic thinks it has come up with a solution by introducing a new system to break down CRTs using a...

It might sound like a pretty self-defeating vanity exercise, but a new service from Australia promises to deliver Twitter users thousands of new followers if they're willing to pay for them. Starting at around £50, uSocial is offering to find followers in blocks of 1,000. The company says it manually searches for people who might be interested...

Like it or loathe it, PayPal has revolutionised online commerce for small and large traders alike, so it's no great surprise to see something similar come to the humble mobile phone. The new phone payment system, which begins later this month for users of Japan's NTT DoCoMo network, allows individuals to exchange money through each other's phone numbers....