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New year resolutions are still fresh in most people's minds.

Gym memberships have been taken out, diets have been started and cigarettes have been given up. Some of those resolutions, no doubt, concern the tens of thousands of PCs which changed hands a few days before.

Computers, like exercise bikes, nicotine patches and Linguaphone tapes are bought with the best of intentions. Those PCs given away on Christmas Day were intended for writing homework, looking up things in encyclopaedias and producing home accounts. What they'll actually get used for is a little different. Games will get played, e-mail will be sent and Web sites, dodgy and otherwise, will be visited. And, of course, some PCs will just gather dust in the spare room and conspire to make their owners feel guilty every time they walk in.

Happily for the owners of home PCs everywhere, new applications are appearing that will help PCs start to reach the parts of houses hitherto out of reach. Most of these concern the magic word digital. For years camcorder owners have been boring their friends rigid with the unedited highlights of their holidays weddings and parties. But the latest generation of digital video cameras can be easily connected to a PC, allowing video to be edited on screen and then fed back into one of the new digital set-top boxes on top of your television.

The impact of digital cameras has been even more dramatic. When they first started to appear four or five years ago, they were expensive and produced dismal results. Just about OK for a blurred passport photo on a company ID card but not much else. And if the cameras were bad, the printers used to get your pictures from your screen to your photo album were worse. The only way to get near-photographic results was to spend thousands of pounds on a dye sublimation printer.

Five years on and the combination of good-quality digital cameras costing little more than a conventional film camera and equally good inkjet printers means that digital photography is finally making serious inroads into the old-fashioned film-based sort. And the great thing about digital photography is that once they're on your computer you can use your digital images however you wish: edit them in a paint program, send them to friends or incorporate them into your Web site. Home PCs need to be about fun as well as education or they won't get used. And digital applications are leading the way.

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