This two-CD set is loaded with five separate programs. Sierra Home Architect will help you design and decorate your dream home in 3D.

Picture this scenario: your daughter is in her bedroom using the old laptop computer to do some schoolwork, you are busy finishing a presentation for work on the desktop computer thats connected to the colour printer and your partner has just arrived home from the gym. Suddenly everyone is in the main computer room.

The perfect blend of price and performance for the average home or small business user.

Hot on the heels of last month’s sub- $2500 projector roundup is HP’s new vp6315.

While the epithet 'multimedia PC' used to be bandied about to over-hype any PC in the mid-'90's that was capable of playing music, rudimentary video, and games, the descriptive was overused so much on sub-par PCs that the impact of any real multimedia capabilities was diminished in the wash of pretenders.

The title says it all, and though I'm wary of anything branded as 'complete', Paul Heltzel's 'Complete Wireless Home Networking' offers both the essential education and the 'walkthrough' for you to start your first home wireless network.

Don't confuse Microsoft Works with a slimmed-down version of Office, because Works is for the home productivity market.

Telstra says it now has more than 300,000 ADSL subscribers and is on target to reach a million by 2005. The problem with home ADSL is that unlike cable, Telstra doesn’t make it easy to network even though it requires an Ethernet connection. Interestingly, the Ethernet requirement for broadband Internet connectivity is also helping to drive the rising popularity of home networks.

Total Home Theatre PC is a company you’d expect to know about these things and you can tell it’s put a great deal of thought in to this system.

The brand new HC100 from Mitsubishi Electric is a more traditional looking home theatre projector with a centremounted lens, and curved lines.

The utilitarian looking InFocus ScreenPlay 4805 is a very capable home theatre projector, provided that you’re looking for a projector mainly for home theatre use.

The Dell 1100MP is a data projector for the most part, but was submitted by Dell for this review with the home theatre projectors.

Before we even delve into this projector's specs, the most important and standout metric with the EMP-S1 is its extremely humble $1,999 price tag, which when compared to the usual $5-10K standard for home cinema, puts the EMP-S1 well within reach of people for whom home video projection was merely a dream.

AVG offers a free home user edition with free updates for the life of the product and that has made it popular with a lot of home PC users looking for a cheap anti-virus solution.

Significant competition from the likes of Optus@Home recently has given cause for Telstra BigPond to devise flat-rate pricing plans that have opened up its cable service to the residential market.

Small form factor (SFF) PCs now have their foot well and truly in the home entertainment and IT/CE crossover market due largely to their aesthetics, functionality and quietness of operating volume. Westan's Biostar product looks to continue along these lines, offering a multimedia PC with all the performance of AMD's 64-bit desktop processor architecture.

As mobiles have gotten more sophisticated and popular over the past few years, it was inevitable that the humble home phone would get a makeover, and the first such 'mobilised' landline phone is Telstra's F3000.

This unit plays more than just your rental movies and existing DVD discs, it's also capable of VBR MP3, WMA, JPEG, PhotoCD, HDCD Xvid, AVI, MPEG layers 1, 2, and 4 play, the latter of which is more commonly referred to as DivX, named after the compression codec.

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.

Why are we reviewing something that is a mere 36GB? Simple -- because this one drops access times and pumps up the transfer rate. Not targeted at the home user, the 36GB WD Raptor is marketed as an enterprise-level SATA drive -- the fastest drive on offer by WD. Capacity becomes an afterthought for the Raptor with its 10,000rpm spindle concerning itself with speed, resulting in seek times of around 5.2ms, compared to the 8.9ms of a 7,200rpm drive.