There was a time when Pinnacle dominated the PC video-editing market. But, after its initial success with the DV500, the advent of sophisticated realtime editing seemed to leave the company behind. While it was a good product, the company’s Pro-ONE arrived when competitive products from Matrox and Canopus had been available for some time. The Pinnacle Edition PRO 5 is an entirely different matter.

Not so long ago, Pinnacle concentrated on manufacturing graphics hardware and bundling third-party software with it. These days the company provides its own digital video editing software and makes no bones about competing with Adobe's Premiere.

In the ever bloating world of mini barebones PCs there is a wide range of build quality and internal design to be witnessed. AOpen has been in the market for a while now, and the XC cube edition is one of the better designed systems in an area where quality can vary wildly from brand to brand.

The annual battle of the small business accounting programs has flared again as both MYOB and Quicken roll-out their 2004 editions. While both have made several tweaks and additions to last year’s models, the main difference this time around is in MYOB’s new product activation model. While many users will consider it overkill, there is little doubt that MYOB and others have suffered as a result of software piracy over the years and this time MYOB is determined to stop it.

Chess games are always a bit tricky to review. Surely not too much can have changed since the last release? Still, like many sports titles, developers are always looking for added extras to tempt us to put aside a perfectly good version and splash out on an upgrade.

Chance or coincidence? AMD releases the Athlon 64, specifically targeted at the consumer performance market, and only days later Intel announces a secret processor aimed squarely at the same MHz-hungry community: the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition (P4EE).

Simplicity is the single most important factor for any newcomer attempting to create their first Web site.

The Ultimate Reference Suite is the latest digital edition of the Britannica. Consisting of three encyclopaedias, numerous dictionaries, thesauri, timelines and even an atlas, it's just as exhaustive as its predecessors, covering mountains of topics in impressive detail.

Microsoft has been producing its Encarta Encyclopedia and World Atlas since the early 1990s, but despite several attempts it has never produced anything that could rightfully claim to be an Australian edition...

With Web Standard/Premium, Design Premium AND Macromedia’s products now absorbed into CS3, choosing the right suite is EASY.

A solid, assured drive with plenty of interfaces and enough style to justify the price.

This book aims to provide information on Microsofts latest operating system, in a fast and easy to digest style.

New wizards make it easier to use, and the range of operations is impressive for such a reasonable price

The first problem you face when reviewing a Linux reference title is that you know youre on to a loser.

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.

A new interface and extra web-protection capabilities make AVG our top free antivirus choice

A free package that scores highly, beating almost all its big-name competition. It’s just a shame it’s such a nag

Packed with extras to target some of Vista’s interesting new features, but it isn’t quite the marvel we were hoping for.

In the tradition of the Dummies series, spends the first part of the book familiarising readers with hardware terminology

Enact comes with the complete box and dice including application software, database, web-server and application server and the server can be run on a basic Windows XP Professional desktop. While the Java-based interface can be a bit buggy and slow at times, it is generally clearly set out and easy enough to use.