This notebook has been designed with classic Sony style: rounded edges, hidden IO inputs and a sleek widescreen footprint. From a connectivity point of view, this 'book has it all, boasting front-mounted Memory Stick Pro port, iLink 4-pin FireWire port and three USB ports.

While we wait with bated breath for the imminent (or was that eventual?) release of Microsoft Media Centre into Australia, the number of companies cashing in on the media functionality of next generation consumer electronics is growing quickly.

We’ve all been warned a million times since the dawn of computing – but we’ll knock it into your head once more for posterity: save often.

Panasonic has gone above and beyond, releasing its NV-GS35 with its massive 30x optical zoom, dwarfing the usual 20 or so times zooms found on other cameras.

A familiar plot – meddling with forces beyond our control – and some new weapons greet you as you once again enter the Mars UAC facility.

There are few boys, and likely some girls, too, that aren’t attracted to the idea of building a castle.

Gone are the innovations introduced in the first game – allowing the player to upgrade specific unit traits via the unit itself; the exciting feel of progressing from one epoch to another and general playability.

The control is simple.

The emphasis is placed on careful investigation of each environment and the wise selection of appropriate weapons and tools.

The world is Paragon City, in which costumed heroes patrol the skies or walk the streets.

It's not often that a company releases a product that is as functional as it is stylish, and can wow the masses in droves. Samsung's D500 does just this, combining the looks of its last generation E800 slide phone and a feature set to rival anything currently on the market.

Stylish and packed with features, it is not the cheapest 12 inch notebook available. This said, if you simply must have the features on offer inside this 'book, then this notebook does it all with style.

Widescreen is still one of the flavours of the month for notebooks and plenty of users are opting to banish boring old 4:3 aspect ratio LCD panels to the land of wind and ghosts.

If your PC is less of a speed demon and more of a dinosaur then it's time to upgrade your CPU. We put the latest low, mid and high end processors to the test.

While AMD has been waving hybrid 32/64-bit CPUs for some time now, speculation has risen over when Intel would unleash their product onto an already expecting market. Here it is, Intel's newest addition to their Extreme Edition clocking in at an impressive 3.73GHz and boasting a 2MB L3 cache.

When Intel announced the production of 90nm products over a year ago, the most obvious change was the move to double the existing 512KB L2 cache to a full 1MB of on die memory. This simple transition added more performance than some of the minor clockspeed increases to date, and made the Prescott a household name.

While the Celeron's history is dotted with major successes, like the legendary Celeron 300A and overclockability, the name has remained a budget brand. Comparatively the CPU lacks features, with only 128KB of L2 cache to AMD's 256KB.

Synonymous with cost effective CPUs, Intel's Celeron has carved a market for itself by producing products which are reliable and boast something many others cannot – interoperability. This has been achievable by producing products that work with the same socket 478 pin configuration found across the entire range of processors.

Despite the processor industry being driven for so long by the now dispelled 'Megahertz Myth', AMD's budget conscious 1.833GHz Sempron 2600+ CPU put in an very good showing.

The FX-55 is AMD's top performer. It's a 2.6GHz beast that will eat through current and future games and applications. Its architecture is based on that of the FX-53, which in turn was based on the first generation FX-51, and AMD has come a long way in bringing 64-bit to the desktop.