If I'd seen one of these when I was an 8 year old, I would have gone on a hunger-strike until my parents bought me one.

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

It may be early days for the technology, but it's still interesting to look at Sony's Blu-Ray drive under the microscope.

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

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.

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.

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.

Intriguing styling makes this near-silent media-centre PC stand out, but it has its foibles

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.

Modern and efficient conversion to WMV with ahead-of-the-curve Silverlight capabilities

A convenient all-in-one media package, but many of the applications can be had for nothing elsewhere

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

The Acer Aspire has a lot of handy multimedia functions that help it work as a desktop replacement/media unit. One of the Aspire’s main selling points is the Arcade feature, which is a Windows Media Centre clone. A button on the notebook fascia opens Arcade, bypassing the Windows OS and enabling all media player functions: DVD, MP3 etc. It works quite well but isn’t as graphically stunning as MCE.

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

A flexible and powerful livingroom PC that ticks almost all the right boxes, as well as being great value.

An adequate Media Centre PC, but Asus’ competitor blows it out of the water.

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

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.

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.