The weather's crap, you're stuck indoors, so why not while away the hours reading interesting technology reviews and news?
It seems as if we've been waiting an age for Intel to release the Ivy Bridge-based 3rd Generation Core processors. The lull is now over, and we have an in-depth review of the Core i7-3770K chip.
Yet Intel announced more than a single processor on Monday. Mooted to cost £150 and replace the well-received Core i5-2500K, we took the much-anticipated Core i5-3570K for a spin, too. Find out if it usurps the 2500K as the best mainstream chip of 2012.
Prefer to get your kicks the pre-built way? Then take a look at PC Specialist Vanquish XT-680, which brings the Core i7-3770K together with a GeForce GTX 680 graphics card. We reckon it's a decent machine with just a couple of shortcomings. Let us know what you think.
But maybe a complete system is out of financial reach. How about speeding up an older PC by using a solid-state drive as a fast cache, all without having to resort to any fiddling about by migrating files. Corsair reckons it has the perfect solution in the Accelerator, which tacks on to your existing mechanical hard drive and purports to boost performance for everyday applications.
In other news, Samsung plays silly beggars, Firefox gets updated to the 12th iteration, NVIDIA all-but announces the GeForce GTX 690 dual-GPU graphics card, Microsoft readies another Windows 8 Preview, Google likes to Drive, and the mighty Nintendo suffers its first-ever annual loss.
