According to a recent ACCC study, people are jumping on the broad-bandwagon in droves. In fact, the amount of people upgrading to broadband has doubled in the last 12 months. And as you might expect, the hardware community has responded by ramping up both Internet sharing and security devices for homes and businesses.

For those users after goliath capacity drives with fast seek and access times, there's the Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 Plus.

The first PC Direct machine we've tested features an eye-catching black anodized case with custom stealth drive face plates on all drives and front USB and audio connectors. Easy access via the tool-less snap panels takes this case the extra mile.

The creme de la creme of Athlon 64 products, the 4000+ is a socket 939 CPU with all the bells and whistles. This bad boy clocks in at 2.4GHz, features a 1MB L2 cache and 2GB HyperTransport memory interconnect to work in conjunction with its on-die memory controller.

It's inside that you find a HyperThreaded Pentium 4 3GHz processor with an 800MHz FSB, plus a gig of DDR400 RAM in dual-channel configuration.

You can't help but to notice the slim-line chassis with its brushed aluminium finish this machine sports. Flipping down the front panel reveals the front-mounted audio, USB, and infrared port, which is a nice inclusion for those corporate customers using PDAs or mobile phones with IR synching.

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.

This is a handset we have been waiting to hit our shores for some time. Sony Ericsson now brings the S700i  to Australia and with it an amazing set of features and quality to match.

The first Dothan notebook to roll off the rank, we were interested to see exactly how much real-world gain Intel is offering in its revised Centrino platform.

Even with falling hardware prices, the expense and yet to be finalised format war rages on with DVD writing technology deterring many a consumer. DVD+R/RW appear to be making headway gradually with both format flexibility and hardware integration into next generation platforms.

IBM has a well-earned reputation within the corporate sector for providing exceptional quality desktop workstations. Their latest model – the ThinkCentre S50, is set to keep that reputation on track.

This is no ordinary notebook, sporting Intel’s 1.6GHz Centrino processor with a 1MB on-die L2 cache, 400MHz frontside bus and a half gig of DDR. It’s nothing short of impressively fast.

Businesses have come to rely on Acer workstations for their stability and usability without a huge price tag, and this system easily fulfills these requirements.

Intel’s push on Centrino notebook branding has only made it so far in the six months since its introduction. So far prices have been high for Centrino notebooks, although Emagen looks set to change this mindset, now offering the N1000 model as a cost-effective alternative option to top of the line name brand notebooks with all the bells and whistles.

When it comes to notebooks, there are a few different flavours with their own specialties.  The trick to purchasing the right notebook is to know your needs and the intended purposes of the unit so you can properly match the correct machine with your requirements.

If you're space conscious or limited when it comes to your PC set up then no doubt you've already looked at the TFT display option at some point. We've got three new TFT offerings from three companies in the Labs this month, which should give you a good idea of the state of play of the TFT market at the moment.