Finding a good PC or notebook for the family is not as hard as you might think. PC Authority  puts the latest models to the test.

Taking photos is only half the fun. Touching them up on your PC and printing them is the other half. PC Authority takes a look at some of the best photo-printers on the market.

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.

There are always moments in life when you wish you had your camera to hand. The Labs team rounds up the latest pocket cameras.

If your PC is less of a speed demon and more of a dinosaur then it's time to upgrade your CPU. We put the latest low, mid and high end processors to the test.

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.

We know you want to play games, so we've put 18 PCI Express graphics cards under the microscope to see who really does the job the best.

Locating the sweet spot in the market for well kitted out machines on a budget, Pioneer has come to the party by introducing it's Power PC model, featuring all the tech goodies without the sour aftertaste of a high price ticket. This black futuristic PC looks quite schmick with its front mounted LCD readout displaying up to date temperature information on the system, so you know exactly what's happening with your cooling.

Panasonic has gone above and beyond, releasing its NV-GS35 with its massive 30x optical zoom, dwarfing the usual 20 or so times zooms found on other cameras.

Physically similar to the Scorpion Z-Box system with its black anodised midi tower, this unit also features a pair of both front-mounted audio 3.5mm sockets and USB ports, perfect for quick plug and play of both bus and externally powered devices such as keyboards, printers, joysticks and removable USB pen drives.

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.

The control is simple.

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.

In the performance stakes the 3200+ came up trumps, finishing middle to top of the pack and clearly cementing itself as a solid performing processor for home, office or pure entertainment.

For such a high specification machine with a large display, we didn’t have high expectations of battery life. We were wrong. Not only is this one of the best looking and functional notebooks we’ve played with in some time, but this notebook managed to stay operating at full load with a looping productivity test for well over three and a half hours – enough for students, road warriors and home users.

We love hardware. As users ourselves we feel your pangs of wanting the newest, fastest rig and components. Unfortunately it's hard to justify the cost of bleeding-edge hardware at the best of times - more so with the cost of single graphics cards at times exceeding the $1000 price barrier. This is as much as some users would spend on a total system upgrade.

It’s one of the facts of the gaming hobbyist’s life: cutting edge games require cutting edge hardware. It’s as set in stone as Moore’s Law (which is itself now 40 years old). Every 12 to 18 months you need to upgrade or get left behind. Our contenders this month make a very good case for starting with a clean slate, and none more so than this month’s winner, the Modtech Civic-64FX.

This isn't the first time we've looked at the tiny Esky-esque PictureMate from Epson and at the time as a standalone product it garnered a Recommended award. It's good to see it do the same in a comparative environment, walking off with a second recommendation from the Labs team.

Along with the Sony Cyber-shot P-93, the Canon Powershot A95 is the big lad of this roundup with a pretty decent 5-megapixel CCD. The rest vary from 3-4-megapixel. While this does give the Canon a bit of an edge over the competition in terms of resolution and functionality, it's the camera's other attributes that cemented this unit in the top three.

Will home media centres do to the entertainment industry what video did to the radio star? With new technology reshaping our lounges, homes could soon become fully functional media hubs.