From iconic machines like the IBM PC to the silliness of Sony’s £1,190 netbook, we’ve scoured the darkest corners and blown dust off some of the oldest, oddest and rarest kit we can find – starting with a true icon of the industry.

IBM PC

Introduced on August 12 1981, IBM’s Personal Computer was the first machine to popularise the now-ubiquitous term – and one of these antiques sits at the back of the PC Pro Lab.

Processing grunt was provided by the single-core, 4.77MHz Intel 8088, and floppy disks and cassettes are both supported. There’s a mighty 256KB of RAM, with 64KB of that soldered onto the motherboard. The IBM PC didn’t come cheap, either: a barebones model without any drives cost $1,565 and the top-end model came with bells, whistles and a monitor for $20,000.

The motherboard includes five eight-bit Industry Standard Architecture slots, with three of ours occupied: there’s a floppy disk drive controller card a SixPakPlus memory expansion board packed with 64KB chips, and a multidisplay adapter that’s actually two slabs of PCB stuck together. In the middle of the machine is an IBM 5 ¼in Diskette Drive.

Only one question remains, though, once we’ve blown the dust off this venerable old machine – can it run Crysis?

Apple Macintosh Plus

The Macintosh Plus might be a disturbing shade of yellow but that’s hardly surprising – it first saw the light of day in 1986. Released for £2,599, it was produced until October 1990 – the longest production run of any Macintosh – and was supported by Mac OS up to 1996.

It broke ground in other ways, too. As the first Macintosh to include a SCSI port it paved the way for external devices such as hard disks, tape drives, printers and CD-ROM drives, and this was also the first Macintosh to use SIMMs for its memory – with a massive 1MB of the stuff included as standard across four 256KB sticks.

Our particular model bears the familiar Cupertino, California label on its rear, but the sticker also reveals that this machine was “Assembled in Ireland” – a far cry from today, where most technology seems to be produced in Asia.

Apple Macintosh Colour Classic

Fast forward a few years – and look under a different test-bench – and you’ll find another piece of Apple history. It’s the first compact Macintosh computer to come with a colour display, and we wouldn’t have the iMac – the world’s finest all-in-one PC – without the Colour Classic paving the way.

Originally priced at $1,400 in February 1993, it ran on Mac OS 7.6.1 – the first version of the OS to drop the “System” from its name so the more distinctive moniker could be trademarked and the OS licensed to third-party Macintosh manufacturers.

This ancient all-in-one was more upgradeable than most of today’s models, too. The Processor Direct Slot was used with the Apple IIe Card, and ran software designed for the older Apple II. This backwards compatibility was supposed to entice the education market to upgrade from Apple II machines to fully-fledged Macintoshes, but other upgrades were also available, from CPU accelerators to Ethernet and video cards.

This versatility means the Colour Classic enjoys a cult following today: users have modded the machine with Power Mac parts so its screen runs at 640 x 480 rather than 560 x 384, and others have fitted motherboards from more powerful models.

Casio Cassiopeia E-115

Technical editor Darien Graham-Smith found the Casio Cassiopeia E-115 hiding at the back of his cupboard, but it first arrived back in October 2000 when PDAs, rather than smartphones, were big news.

So, what did you get for £422? There’s the sturdy exterior, which we described as “dull-grey silver” and “resting on its laurels”, alongside a cradle that “feels cheap and doesn’t engage with the Cassiopeia as solidly as we’d like” in its full review.

It wasn’t all bad news, with a 240 x 320 LCD screen that was better than its rivals, and a 131MHz StrongARM processor that was “fast enough to ensure instantaneous contact searches and speedy application switching”, according to us. It also had 16MB of ROM and 32MB of RAM memory – “about as much as you currently need”, at least back then.

Oh, and the software? Microsoft Windows CE 3.0 PocketPC Edition. Our model is old and, presumably, scarred by Darien’s cupboard, so it wouldn’t turn on – although that’s probably for the best, given that we concluded that the Casio simply couldn’t “match the standard” set by Compaq’s iPAQ.

Apple iMac G4

The G4 marked the first major redesign of the iMac, but the forlorn model found in the PC Pro Lab has clearly seen better days. It’s missing its monitor bezel, the distinctive round base is looking grubby, and it wouldn’t turn on – although that chrome, cantilevered arm is as smooth as it was when the G4 was eased from its box in 2002.

We described the G4 as “smooth and elegant design that puts other computer makes to shame”. Even now it stands out in a sea of modern all-in-ones that all look a little too familiar.

Our review also highlighted Apple’s concentration on “excellent design and ease of use”, but that has downsides – a specification we described as “Paleolithic”. It’s the first time we’ve seen computers compared to dinosaurs, but the SDRAM was slow and the GeForce 2 MX graphics chip was a generation behind the curve. It might look nice – as Apple devices are wont to do – but PCs ran our Photoshop 7 benchmark almost twice as quickly.

Dell Latitude

The oldest laptop we managed to find demonstrates the changing of technology. This Dell Latitude isn’t quite as backward as we first thought. It’s either a C540 or C640 – we’re not sure which, as it’s been hidden on a high shelf for far too long – and it’s a mix of old problems and forgotten boons.

It’s running a Pentium 4 chip with Windows XP, but the most striking thing about this machine is its design – or lack of it. Plain plastic is the order of the day, and the lid features the familiar Dell logo, along with the kind of build quality that we’d slate if this machine were reviewed today.

The base doesn’t cover itself in glory, either, with stickers, flaps, screws, feet and even some exposed fans. It’s also obvious where laptops have fallen backwards as companies rush to build slim, snazzy Ultrabooks: we rarely see keyboards with the kind of comfort, responsiveness and travel as this Latitude offers, and the 4:3 screen has a native resolution of 1,600 x 1,200 – a huge amount of desktop real estate compared to the 1,366 x 768 and 1,600 x 900 screens that now seem to be the norm.

Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT, 7600 GS and AMD Radeon HD 2600 XT

We’ve a big plastic tub full of graphics cards in the Labs and, while most of them are recent, a trio of PCBs lurking amid the anti-static bags and DVI to D-SUB adapters come from decidedly older stock. Two Nvidia cards, the GeForce 7300 GT and 7600 GS, are joined by AMD’s Radeon HD 2600 XT.

They were launched in 2006 and 2007, and they handily illustrate the impressive speed at which technology is pushed forward. The first 28nm GPU has just arrived but, back then, Nvidia and AMD were using 90nm and 65nm processes – and the 390 million transistors in the AMD card pales when compared to the 4.3 billion in AMD’s latest.

The bandwidth statistics are telling, too: the Radeon card churns through 35.2GB/sec in its 512MB incarnation, with the 7300 GT and 7600 GS offering 10.67GB/sec and 12.8GB/sec respectively. The latest high-end card, the Radeon HD 7970, chews through 264GB/sec – and even modest boards, such as Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 550 Ti, handle 98.5GB/sec.

Oh, and our benchmarks? The 7600 GS played Call of Duty 2 at 18fps when run at 1,280 x 1,024. Bless.

Sony VAIO P-series

Sony senior vice president Mike Abary famously said his company would never join the “race to the bottom” when netbooks hit the big time, and he wasn’t joking – Sony’s VAIO P-series cost £1,190 inc VAT for the top-end model.

That money paid for radical design, with a base occupied entirely by the keyboard,  that’s still so small and fiddly that you have to peck at the keys, prod at the trackpoint and squint at the 8in 1,600 x 900 screen. The Z-series Atom was decidedly Z-list, too, thanks to performance that couldn’t match £350 rivals.

They’re from some of the systems not featured in our first post, and come with a range of features designed to whet appetites and empty wallets. All have at least two graphics cards, some have bespoke water-cooling systems, and there’s even one that’s been designed with input from BMW. And that’s before we’ve got to keyboards that have their own cooling fans.

Like what you see? If you do, then you’ll want to pick up issue 204 of PC Pro, which hits the shelves tomorrow with seven of these remarkable systems taking centre stage.

Lining up the systems on our test benches, though, proved just how spectacular these PCs are: SSDs, water-cooling and touchscreen fan controllers on the inside; triple monitors, adjustable mice and £400 speakers on the outside.

As well as benchmarking, I’ve spent plenty of time in the Labs taking pictures of these stunning computers. To get the full low-down on which system takes the Ultimate PC crown, you’ll have to wait until Thursday when PC Pro issue 204 hits the shelves. Until then, take a look at these pictures, try not to drool, and pick out which you’d buy if you had several thousand pounds to spare.

Us tech folk take pride in building our own computers, but these days it’s easy, isn’t it? As long as you’ve got a motherboard with the right socket and the right type of memory, you’re good to go: lock down the processor, snap in the RAM, pop in the graphics card and plug in the hard disk. Voila, a computer.

Not everyone follows this traditional route, though. Programming enthusiast Jack Eisenmann has constructed his own PC from scratch using TTL chips and, presumably, plenty of patience.

He’s dubbed it the DUO Adept, and it comes with a specification that won’t exactly trouble our fastest machines: 64KB of main memory, 256 bytes of RAM and, in total, 263 lines of code.

It’s remarkable what can be done with such a relatively simple machine. His demonstration video, which we’ve included below, shows off Eisenmann’s homemade OS – programmed using a binary interface – and a simple game that he’s written himself.

He’s even managed to put it into a see-through chassis although, when compared with most of the cases we’re used to seeing, it’s a little simple. Still, there’s one question that needs to be answered about the DUO Adept – can it run Crysis?

Pictures and video courtesy of Jack Eisenmann.

We asked PC Pro readers which type of screen they prefer. They answered as follows:

And this is the type of screen used on the nine ultra-value laptops from our recent Labs in issue 200:

I could have reproduced exactly the same chart for our touchscreen PC labs in the current issue. And, of course, it’s not only the PC makers who’ve fallen in love with glossy screens: Apple customers have formed an online protest demanding that matte screens are offered as an option in the iMac line-up. Some of those Mac fans claimed that glossy screens were such a turn-off that they’d been forced to migrate to Windows just to escape the glossy lock-in.

Why do people hate glossy screens so much? Reflections are undoubtedly a major source of anguish. Speaking as someone who use a glossy screen laptop every day, I’m constantly irritated by the reflections cast across my screen by the overhead strip lighting in the office and, worse still, the sunlight making my screen near unwatchable on the train to and from the office.

And anyone who has a glossy screen on their shared family PC will surely be overly familiar with the daily routine of wiping fingerprints from the display, no matter how many times you angrily demand they don’t put their Marmite-sodden digits anywhere near the screen.

Let’s hope the PC makers wake up to the degree of dissatisfaction with glossy displays and bring back the welcome matte.

That 72 hours of raw-edged panic was quite enough for me to focus on the sins of those who come and ask for help, which can be every bit as difficult as the sins of the fixers. So pardon me while I abuse the Pro blogs to let my friend know how I felt about her approach to the whole sorry matter.

Dear Mildred (name changed to protect the innocent here),

It was delightful to hear about your holiday in Kuala Lumpur, for 20 minutes, before you got around to mentioning that you had brought back a DVD burned for you by a charismatic local photographer and thrown it in that laptop you obtained from me six months or more ago.  It was sadly not surprising to hear that once that DVD had been introduced to the laptop, you had laid yourself wide open to every hacker and script kiddie on the planet. The parts I did find surprising then came so thick and fast that I was barely able to assemble a coherent reply, so let’s unpack all your assumptions and deal with them item by item, now that facts can take precedence over emotional blackmail.

- No, it doesn’t matter how you imagine viruses work: they will not be amenable to persuasion, they will do what they like. Responses like “that seems a bit far-fetched” won’t get your laptop fixed, or keep the hackers away. After the initial, invisible infection has granted the underworld open access to your PC, they are unlikely to steal your personal data – you’re not rich enough – but they will sell off access to your machine, for a relative pittance, to much less accomplished hackers. It’s their lesser efforts you can see, and they’re just evidence of the basic high-quality infection.

- No, you can’t sue AVG. You put a physical piece of storage in your DVD drive and clicked on various dialog boxes, some of which you neither understood, nor can now remember, because you wanted to get at the content on the disk. Once you do that, it’s game over.

- No, I am not responsible for everything that befalls something I once owned. It is now your laptop and your responsibility. Curiously, I am not sitting around at home doing nothing waiting for machines to die, and there is no way that you can cajole, seduce or otherwise influence me to “just spend ten minutes on it”. There are two reasons for this. One is that it’s perfectly clear that if I do touch it, I will never hear the end of the matter for as long as I live. The other is that once you stuck that DVD in there and started saying “yes, OK” to every resulting dialog box, you sank the whole thing. It doesn’t take 10 minutes to sort that out; it requires a complete machine reload to properly guarantee the infection is history.

- No, there is no neat and handy way I’ve been keeping secret that allows you to retain your extensive collection of stolen software licences loaded on that laptop. It’s even possible (but unlikely) that one of those copies you downloaded from total strangers via BitTorrent was actually the source of infection, not the DVD from that far-off and well-known training school for global cybercrime supercriminals. But you don’t believe that possibility either, so that’s me told good and proper. I personally remember all those nights in the 90’s when your standard response to any creative suggestion was “that’s great, but don’t tell anyone else so they can’t steal your idea” – rampant hypocrisy always offends me, especially when the software you’ve stolen is used to maintain your creative business. Perhaps you wouldn’t be in this dire situation if you had actually paid for the things you use (and therefore could reinstall them), even paying for a decent image-based backup program would have saved your bacon. Just because I use one and recommend it to everyone doesn’t mean it must therefore be nerdy and incomprehensible so you shouldn’t touch it.

- Don’t worry. I don’t propose to identify the specific products you don’t have licences for, mainly because I think the whole business of what’s free and what’s not is now so murky and confused that I don’t think you are even doing anything special these days. It’s not something I will involve myself in, though, which is in part why I am more tilted towards the hardware business, than software, these days. I have gone about as far as I can here to make it clear why your approach to the way your laptop drives your business, mixed with your approach to the way that people in the computer business sell things to you, adds up to a disaster waiting to happen. And I do disaster recovery, not disaster participation.

Love and kisses,

Steve

The conversation was triggered by my spontaneous thought that one of the reasons AMD might only now have decided to ditch the ATI brand was because it could suddenly get away with slapping AMD stickers on new laptops.

Let me explain: companies such as Intel and Microsoft pay PC manufacturers to have those stubborn little stickers welded to their machines. It struck me that the big, bad Intel of yesteryear – the one that was paying PC manufacturers to ignore AMD processors – wouldn’t have been too chuffed to see AMD stickers appearing alongside its own, and may have threatened to pull those payments if PC manufacturers sidled up to the enemy. (I stress this is merely a theory; I have no evidence that Intel ever threatened to do anything of the sort. But it wouldn’t be entirely out of character.)

ATI stickers, on the other hand, have been a fixture on PCs for years and Intel was much less likely to kick up a fuss about them. So one of the reasons AMD might have decided to persist with the ATI brand was to retain its sticker space on laptops with Intel processors and ATI graphics.

Now that authorities on both sides of the Atlantic have rapped a ruler across Intel’s knuckles for such anti-competitive behaviour, however, AMD may well have concluded that it had nothing to lose by rebranding the graphics business. That was my theory and I was (if you excuse the pun) sticking with it.

At least until today, when I read a blog post by David Pogue of the New York Times, who claims AMD isn’t very keen on the whole sticker idea at all. Pogue says that next year AMD will switch to stickers that peel off easily, unlike the blow-torch resistant blighters that are used today. AMD might even phase them out completely.

Pogue applauds AMD “for taking the lead in trying to change this pointless, tacky practice”. While I’m no keener on those horrible little stickers than he is, I’m not so sure AMD’s gesture is as altruistic as Pogue claims.

Those stickers certainly aren’t “pointless”: seeing that Intel logo every time you flip open your laptop is enormously powerful brand reinforcement. When consumers go into PC World and buy their next laptop which one are they more likely to choose? The one with the processor brand name they recognise or the one they’ve never heard of?

I suspect the reason AMD’s suddenly keen to peel off its stickers is because it can’t afford to match Intel’s marketing budget, and is trying to generate some positive PR by appealing to people’s taste. I’m sure Intel isn’t going to give up so easily.

Who’d have thought stickers would have become such a talking point?

Can I use normal living-room stereo speakers with my PC?

Probably not directly, but essentially yes. There’s no fundamental difference between PC speakers and normal speakers, except that PC speakers have a built-in amplifier. To use standard hi-fi stereo speakers you just need an amplifier to drive them. So, either get yourself a separate hi-fi amp and speakers, or take the cheap option and plug your PC into the stereo in the living room.

How do I do that then?

If you take a look at the back of your stereo or TV surround-sound receiver, you’ll almost certainly see a couple of spare plugs labelled something like ‘Aux’. You can directly attach the audio output of your PC into one of these. Usually, inputs to your hi-fi are RCA (also called phono) connectors, with separate white and red plugs for the left and right stereo channels like this:

The output from your PC is likely to be a single, 3.5mm audio output jack. If you have multi-channel HD audio there will be several jacks but you want the green one, which will probably be labelled with an arrowed icon showing it’s an output like this:

All you need to connect the PC to the stereo is a 3.5mm-to-RCA stereo cable, which costs a few quid from somewhere like Maplin.

I can’t see an ‘Aux’ connector on the back of my stereo

Not the end of the world. You can put your PC’s audio output into almost any analogue input of a hi-fi amplifier. It doesn’t matter if it’s labelled ‘CD’, ‘tape in’, ‘aux’ or something like ‘A/V’. They’re just convenient labels – they all take the same line-level audio signal. As long as there are two RCA plugs, one red and one white, and they’re labelled as an input or grouped in with the other inputs (in other words it’s not an output like ‘tape out’) then you can use it. So for instance on the back of the A/V receiver pictured above, you could use the ‘tape in’ inputs.

There’s only one analogue input you can’t use:

Can I use the phono input?

No, sorry. The phono input of a stereo (sometimes labelled MM or MC, for ‘moving magnet’ and ‘moving coil’) is for a record player, and it’s designed to accept the tiny electrical signal that’s generated by the needle moving in the grooves of a record. If you attach the PC audio output to it, you’re unlikely to do any damage but the sound will be hideously distorted. So don’t. Note that, annoyingly, the word ‘phono’ is also applied to RCA cables. But phono cables and the phono input are different things.

Right, I’ve found a spare input on the back of my stereo.

Good. All you need to do now is plug the 3.5mm audio jack into the green output of your PC, and the Phono connectors into the left and right sockets of your chosen input at the back of the stereo.

Now switch on your stereo and turn the volume down. As in, down to almost zero. That prevents all sorts of issues ranging from spilt tea to burst eardrums if you’re stupid enough to put your ear right next to the speaker (never, ever put your ear right next to a speaker: you’ll end up partially deaf when it suddenly cuts in at full volume). Now press whatever button you need to press on the front of the stereo to select the input you’re using.

Finally, try playing some music on the PC, or clicking the volume slider in Windows to get the ‘bonk’ sound. If you can’t hear anything, increase the volume slowly. If you still can’t hear anything, don’t turn the volume up to full, turn it back down again. It’s probably something simple at fault. Prime candidates are accidentally having the audio muted in Windows, or having the wrong output selected in Windows’ audio properties.

Can I use a digital output?

A hefty proportion of PCs these days have some sort of digital audio output, which will potentially give you better quality than using the analogue output. To make use of it though, you’ll need a stereo with digital inputs that’s able to convert the digital ones and zeroes into an analogue signal that the amplifier can use to drive your speakers. Either that, or an offboard DAC (digital-to-analogue converter) to mediate between the two.

There are two types of digital audio output you might find on your PC. Both use the same digital format (known as S/PDIF for the Sony/Philips digital interface format). But one uses electrical signals while the other uses light. They’re known, not surprisigly, as electrical (sometimes coaxial) S/PDIF, and optical S/PDIF.

If your motherboard has a digital coaxial output, it’ll be coloured yellow. But don’t take that as proof positive because other things like composite video outputs can also be yellow – you’ll need to check in your notherboard manual.

Optical digital outputs will have a little socket with a kind of bung in them. Pull it out and you’ll probably see it glowing red in a terrific sci-fi kind of way. Optical digital connections need a cable called a TOSLINK cable, the name of which is derived from ‘Toshiba Link’ and looks like this:

Laptops

The great thing about optical digital outputs is that they can be integrated into laptops. They’re often disguised as 3.5mm audio jacks, and are actually dual-use. You can plug a 3.5mm electrical audio cable in to get an analogue audio output, or you can get yourself a TOSLINK-to-3.5mm adapter and plug it in like this:

That means that you can use your laptop as a kind of handy media-centre jukebox, ripping all your CDs to it. I did this a few years back and it’s a hell of a lot more convenient than digging CDs out.

If you’re determined to use a digital output from your PC/laptop but your stereo doesn’t have either a coaxial or optical digital input, you can get yourself an offboard DAC like this one.

If you look closely (click on the picture for a larger view), you may notice that it didn’t actually arrive in pristine condition. The box was clearly battered and crushed in transit, developing a big split up the side through which the contents could easily have fallen out.

Of course, parcels get squished and thrown about all the time. That’s why commercial PC retailers encase their systems in weapons-grade polystyrene before allowing them anywhere near a courier.

But when you buy on eBay, you leave the safe dispatch of your goods in the hands of an individual – an individual who may naively imagine that the kindly lady at the Post Office will ensure no harm comes to their lovingly-packaged item.

The breakable truth

As those of us who send and receive PC’s every day know, the sad reality is that even as you skip happily out the door, that kindly lady is handing your parcel to a lorry-driving wideboy to whom it is a matter of utter indifference whether your parcel arrives intact, or at all. Go ahead, write “FRAGILE” on the box – it’ll still just get chucked in the back of the van with all the other fragile boxes.

Maybe I’m being unfair. You get the service you pay for, and if we were really serious about things like “THIS WAY UP” and “DO NOT BEND” we’d pay for our packages to go by taxi. We don’t, for the same reason we take the tube ourselves.

But as I say, the man in the street probably doesn’t appreciate just how much protection a PC system needs if it’s to survive the ordeal of parcel post. And even if he does, he’s unlikely to have the right materials to hand. My seller conscientiously surrounded my PC in rolls and rolls of bubble-wrap, which did nothing whatsoever for the structural integrity of the box.

In the end, there’s no one really to blame for this: it’s just an unhappy disjoint between our (not unreasonable) expectations of parcel delivery, and the (not unreasonable) reality.

But it is, very clearly, just one more reason to keep your fingers firmly crossed when you buy from eBay.

Option 1:

Asus’s little Eee Box PC is limited in its everyday functions due to the Atom inside, and on the optical front it doesn’t even stretch to a CD-ROM drive, but it does have its merits. For a start it’s tiny, quiet and consumes little power when on. It looks good, will fit snugly into any nook or cranny of a desk, and the cheapest I could find it in stock was £245.94 including VAT and delivery – within my budget.

• 1.6GHz Atom N270, 1GB DDR2
• 160GB hard disk
• Windows XP Home

Option 2:

The Zoostorm PC from Ebuyer remains the most powerful PC I’ve yet seen that fits (just) under the £250 limit. The Pentium Dual-Core, 2GB RAM and 250GB hard disk are far beyond all rival systems that have included the same Vista Home Premium OS, and I think I’ve just about exhausted all search avenues to find a PC better. It’s big, ugly and probably not quiet, but for everyday use it makes a strong argument.

• 2.2GHz Pentium Dual-Core E2200, 2GB DDR2
• 250GB hard disk
• Windows Vista Home Premium

Option 3:

There is one other alternative that has merit for a different reason: it includes a monitor. Now, there are plenty of sub-£250 PC and monitor deals around if you know where to look, but most cripple the performance by cramming in slow CPUs, 1GB of RAM and Vista Home Basic. This Compaq Presario SR5601 has a Celeron Dual Core and squeezes Home Premium into a price of £185.94 (if I nip across the road to PC World and pick it up). This leaves me with enough to order a Misco Saver 17in Wide TFT (a HannsG HW17MSV by another name) and squeeze in at £246.67.

• 1.6GHz Celeron Dual-Core E1200, 1GB DDR2
• 160GB hard disk
• 17in widescreen TFT
• Windows Vista Home Premium

The big dilemma:

So which would you go for? Do the small dimensions of an Eee Box appeal to any home users at all or is it more of an office tool? Does the inclusion of a cheap-as-chips 17in monitor make up for the compromises on other key components? Am I right to demand a minimum of Vista Home Premium or XP Home or should I scrap all this and go for a Linux system?

I’ll be placing the order for the weekend, but I won’t be revealing which I’ve gone for. Thanks for your help up to now, if you want to sway my final decision one way or another please dive into the comments below.