The one thing I haven’t spent much money on is cables. You know, those snaking trails that hook your speakers to your amp; your PC to your DAC or home cinema receiver. My power cables are black (they came in the box); my speaker cables are a fetching shade of blue, and my digital cables? Well, there were some lying around in PC Pro’s labs (That’s £15 you owe us Sasha – Ed).

This morning, though, I’m worried that I might be missing something. Something crucial. Something that, say, for the sum of £16,114.72, could revitalise my music collection and destroy my credit rating with one fell swoop. I’m talking about a speaker cable.

Not just any speaker cable. The marketing blurb for the Kimber Select KS-6068 is unequivocal: “Listening confirms that they are significantly better, with a lower noise floor and even better detail retrieval and transparency.”

And just in case your hi-fi system is just too far away from your speakers, you can upgrade to the 3.5m variant for £21,387.57. Yes, that’s more than £5,000 per metre.

Get your orders in now.

Last week I finally put together a specification I was happy with and ordered my components, and it was soon time to start building. A somewhat slap-dash assembly proved that the rig worked, and yesterday my three replacement case fans turned up.

Fitting those wasn’t easy – the two fans at the front of the machine were surrounded by small, bevelled metallic edges, so removing them from the chassis was a combination of brute force and pure luck which left my fingers covered in small cuts. Once installed, though, the three fans worked like a dream, and the noise pumping out of the Warrior 250 – which is the machine’s current name, incidentally – was halved.

The successful fan installation meant that I could press my cable management kit into service, and liberal use of cable ties and sticky pads resulted in a chassis that many a professional PC builder would be proud of: power cables are tied to free drive bays, smaller cables are lashed to the bottom of the chassis and some spare wire is even tucked away behind the motherboard, out of sight.

After my earlier overclocking misadventures – my initial 20% overclock saw the PC fail to even get to the motherboard loading screen – I restricted my ambitions to an initial 5%. This worked fine, so I upped the overclock to 10%, which gave me a clock speed of 2.75GHz – enough for now, although I haven’t yet delved into the more advanced options available in the BIOS. Still, a 10% performance boost isn’t to be sniffed at, especially when trying to run more demanding applications.

I’m intending to dive into the more hardcore performance options tomorrow to see if I can extract more performance out of my plucky Pentium Dual Core.

In the mean-time, Warrior 250 has the naming crown – but late contenders are always welcome, so post them in the comments below.

Used to the fluctuating performance of ADSL, my new service runs like a dream. It doesn’t drop out, it doesn’t slow down when someone next door phones a call centre in India, and – best of all – it runs as fast as it should.

I ordered the “Up to 4Mb” service and last night ran a speed checker: my download rate is a little over 3.8Mb/s. Considering that’s faster than I ever got at my last address from my “Up to 16Mb” Sky service, I’m absolutely ecstatic with the results.

Others out there may have had wonderful experiences with ADSL, others may achieve speeds close to those they were promised when they signed up. I personally haven’t ever got what I paid for from broadband, until now. In this house at least, ADSL is history.

The answer, according to those lovely folks over at BT and TalkTalk, appears to be “as difficult as we can possibly make it without sticking two fingers up and suggesting yoghurt pots and a piece of string”.

Here’s the deal: the current TalkTalk line is in the process of being transferred to the previous tenant’s new address, but I’ve been told that’ll take a whopping four weeks (starting, bizarrely, from a week after I moved in). Both TalkTalk and BT have insisted I cannot do anything with the perfectly good phone line in my house until after that point – despite the fact that it’s currently taking and making no calls. It’s effectively useless.

Even worse, though, is that both companies then proceeded to fight to not have to take my custom. TalkTalk insisted the line would automatically revert to BT after that, and they could no longer help me – odd seeing as most of their new customers are switched over from BT lines. BT countered by saying the line was now TalkTalk’s property, and I’d have to stump up £125 to get it switched back over.

Faced with the not wholly attractive prospect of waiting four weeks to find I have no line at all, I gave up on the both of them.

Five minutes later, I got off the phone to Virgin Media. My broadband is already activated, I can install it myself and I’ll be online (with a far more reliable connection than ADSL, I’d imagine) in days. Now if only they still showed Sky One…