The time for gift giving is almost upon us, and whether you celebrate Christmas or not, Australia will be shutting down over the Christmas break. This makes it a perfect time to give your family and friends gifts, give yourself a treat, or just muck around with some cool high-tech gadgetry.
It doesn't matter if you're a technophile or you know a technophile, there's something in the following pages for the technology lover in all of us. The products we've reviewed here run the full gamut from the exceedingly techie (such as the Fanstorm fan controller on page 128) to the mildly techie (the Bensu mini-Nissan GT-R remote control car on page 111) to a more sophisticated form of techdom (the Sunbeam BC6300 Wine Chiller on page 114).
Regardless of your level of geekness, it's amazing how much good stuff you can buy for under $100. There's a huge variety of products here. Certain products have come down a lot in price, making them more accessible – you can now get a DVD-ROM and complement it with surround sound from one of the soundcards reviewed, get yourself a reasonable set of speakers, and turn your PC into an entertainment centre.
There are also quite a few products here that can generally improve your computing experience.
Still using an old ball mouse? There's a tonne of great optical mice out there for well under $100, and they're not only superior in terms of accuracy, but you'll never have to fish around inside your mouse cleaning out the scum to get it working again.
USB storage devices also make excellent gifts, especially considering how much they've come down in price.
A year ago, an 8MB model would have cost you $99 – you can now get eight times that amount of storage for the same price.
The hard work is done. All that's left for you to do is choose which of the 100 awesome hardware gifts we've reviewed you're going to give to whom.
Technical Editor: Darren Ellis
Contributors: Daniel Gardiner, David Kidd, John Gillooly, Stuart Ridley, Tim Dean, Valens Quinn