Is the European commission really fighting its case against Microsoft to defend ordinary computer users against a corporate giant abusing its dominance of the world's software market, as Brussels likes to claim?

It's not a new phenomenon, but the gulf has been growing, and Jonas spells it out at TechNudge: it's a lot cheaper to buy a cheap Dell than assemble your own PC from parts.

The Bare Feats website has compared programs running under Windows XP Pro via Boot Camp and Mac OS X 10.4.6 (Tiger), both running on a MacBook Pro with 2.0GHz Intel Core Duo, 2GB of 667MHz memory and Radeon X1600 Mobility GPU. The results are not necessarily obvious -- for example,…

I am considering purchasing a new iMac. I bought a Mac OS 9.1 system just before they uprated it so would welcome advice as to whether I should wait. Peter King

It has been suggested that to speed up our slow computer, we need to reinstall Windows as well as download various programs. The person would charge £90 for this. Is this the right way to go about it and if so is the price reasonable? Paul Gabriel

I have acquired an external hard drive set up with the FAT32 file system. Should I re-format to NTFS before using it to match the hard drive of my laptop, running XP? Tim Gossling