It's a close race between this draft-n Vista Media Extender and the Xbox 360 for getting HD video to your TV. If you watch video from your Vista PC, read on.

A Media Center Extender, upscaling DVD player and great games console

MSI's MegaBook L61OI lives up to its 'mega' moniker with a large 15.4-inch widescreen TFT, desktop CPU, excellent graphics and pumping audio. The model we looked at was a pre-production prototype notebook and as such was a little shaky and did not come with all the inclusions a final model will have. As a proof of concept, however, the notebook is quite good.

Altech's Maestro Pro is a Home Theatre PC based on Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005.

The Qosmio is the absolute pinnacle in multimedia notebooks. It brings everything you need for a good Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE) system and squeezes it into a notebook form-factor. Albeit a large notebook form-factor. Yes the Qosmio is a huge and heavy notebook, but it's not nearly as heavy as it would have been if it was packed with desktop internals as many desknotes of this size usually are.

Flexible, beautifully designed and reasonably priced. An excellent attempt to attract the masses.

A Media Center PC and 32in LCD TV all-in-one.

A very tidy solution for streaming your downloaded video to the TV, without the need for a full Media Center PC.

A fantastic Media Center PC at an extraordinary price.

A decent PC with media abilities bolted on, transforming this into a good lounge machine.

Windows Media Center Edition (MCE) 2005 was launched with quite a bit of fanfare late last year, and not least of all because it was the first time in its 18 month life Australians could buy systems based on the OS.

The notebook winner this month was a close call. Two units stood out as being at the top of the multimedia field: the Pioneer D47K and the Acer Aspire 1802WSM. Feature-by-feature they were very closely matched, but we chose the Pioneer for several reasons, one of which was its advanced media capabilities.

A stylish, silent well-featured Media Center PC at a decent price.

The look of Altech's offering split the office. Some liked the glossy black lid and silver and matte black insides, while others thought it too lumpy: the battery sticks out, it has protruding feet which dig into your lap and the sides that aren't flat or symmetrical. But aesthetics aside, it's a solidly built notebook.

HP is adamant that the digital home of the future (and now for that matter) has a midi-tower PC in it next to the TV.

The BenQ Joybook 7000 v07 is a multimedia PC with some MCE-like abilities. It comes loaded with QMedia Center - another MCE clone - and a PCMCIA-sized remote. QMedia operates much like MCE in that there is a main page – coloured BenQ purple of course - from which the usual Pictures and Videos icons enable navigation of the user’s media files.

Nominating Sato as our winner for the desktop machines this month was fairly straightforward, especially when compared to deciding the outcome of the closely-fought notebook war. Because, even though the Sato was outdone by one or two systems in terms of performance, nothing beat it on pure value for money.

It turns out that Microsoft [I]is[/I] bringing out Windows XP Media Center Edition in Australia, but until such time as it materialises -- and Microsoft Australia is being very sketchy on the dates -- those of us looking to integrate our PC media files with our televisions and hi-fi systems have to turn to bridging solutions.

A good-looking, ergonomically excellent laptop with a wealth of multimedia capabilities for home users.

McAfee puts out its VirusScan 2004 in two versions - boxed or downloaded and managed from the internet. Whatever way you do it, the installation is simplicity itself with no difficult questions to answer or confusing choices to make.