Aunt Ethel hasn’t seen you for 12 months. As she plants that dry kiss just in front of your ear and clutches you to her lavender-smelling bosom, you are already grimacing at the prospect of four days cooped up with the old dear. Escape is not an option, but you, cunning reader, can extricate yourself from the embarrassment of a charades …

We’re all obsessed with downloading gigabytes of movies, music and TV — the problem is where to put it all. You kit yourself out with a PC sporting a huge 250GB hard drive, but within weeks it’s so full of movie trailers, MP3s and BitTorrented TV programmes that you need to offload some of your media. So you score an …

Convenience is the key word when it comes to home-cinema systems. Nothing drives your significant other nearer to mental collapse than yet another horrendous tangle of cabling. The solution? Space-saving designs that are easy to use and, more recently, the introduction of ‘convergence’ features that allow you to access a wider range of media from separate sources. JVC’s latest range …