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Are you old enough to remember when car buffs could really soup up an automobile? In those bygone days, grease-spattered amateur mechanics spent weekends tinkering, tweaking, and twiddling under the hood. The end result: a finely tuned hot rod that left stock vehicles in the dust.

Those days may be fading away for cars, but they're in full swing for PCs. In fact, your current PC--whether getting a bit long in the tooth or hot off the conveyor belt--is probably a bit of a compromise. Most of today's PCs are designed for garden-variety computing such as word processing or Web browsing. Fortunately, myriad available add-ins, add-ons, and accessories offer seemingly infinite upgrade possibilities. You can customize that boring beige box, whether it's your office workhorse or your family's e-mail gateway, and transform it into the millennium equivalent of a 1960s hot rod. To show you some of the possibilities, we've developed a few upgrade scenarios that you can use as jumping-off points.

No matter what route you decide to take in the supercharging of your computer, we're here to help. We'll start out with three sample upgrade projects. In addition, we provide a step-by-step guide to making some common upgrades--tasks such as installing add-in cards, more RAM, or a new hard drive.

Starting with a bare-bones, off-the-shelf system, we created a sound and media center worthy of any home-theater buff, a state-of-the-art digital darkroom for photography hounds, and a screaming game PC for serious players.

Each of the projects had a common starting point--a Dell Dimension XPS T600r system with a Pentium III-600 processor, 64MB of RAM, and a 9.5GB IDE hard drive. Your upgrading needs may vary, but even our fairly capable base system needed some significant enhancements to meet our project specifications.

For each of these projects, we provide a summary of the minimum system requirements, a shopping list of components, a price range, the expected upgrade time and expertise level, and some power tips. And we have left enough wiggle room to give you a range of choices for each project. So you can get started with lower-end components and then upgrade later, or you can lay down the bucks for the best right off the bat.

You can mix and match upgrade components from each of our projects, too. And though our example projects are geared more toward a home environment than to the business realm, many of the individual components we use will produce great results on a PC used in a small office or home office. When it comes to upgrades, nothing is set in stone.