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.

Lacks in power, but terrific hardware design makes this an intriguing take on the Eee brand.

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

The EVO PC is the smallest barebones in the 'shoebox' form factor we tested this month. It weighs in at the ridiculously low 2.2kg with power supply, but without the Pentium 4 heatsink.

Similar in nature to the Zinwell ProV (June 2002, page 46) but with better execution, the X-Media DreamBox is a small set-top box for your desktop that lets you watch TV, video, console games and DVDs on your monitor without the need to power on your PC.

The idea of using your PC as the central control point for your home theatre has been bandied about for some time.

Just a couple of years ago, the PC speech recognition and dictation market saw four key players jostling for position, but today the contest is just between IBM and one other player, Dragon.

Voice recognition is the holy grail of computing: the ability to walk around your room and dictate to your PC is an attractive one, however the real experience with voice recognition is far different.

Ongoing concerns about the security of wireless networks and an increasing demand to be able to connect remotely to office and home networks has forced many people to look for a reasonably priced VPN solution. Virtual Private Networks use the Internet to establish a secure link between an external PC and a local network.

Shuttle's push on the small form factor market has seen the PC finally migrate from the bedroom to become an integral part of the lounge room and entertainment set up. Capable of a number of varied roles, these include file servers, HDTV receiving boxes and media streaming machines.

The Iwill ZPC is the smallest PC case we've seen to date, measuring a tiny 184mm x 54mm x 263mm. If you're after the ultimate in super compact computing, look no further than this unit.

One of the more difficult units to navigate whilst installing hardware, ABIT's DigiDice barebones was one of only two submitted systems to feature bay real estate to accommodate more than a single optical drive, the other system being the Soltek Qbic EQ-3401M.

A genuine step forward for the laptop, with unbelievable capabilities for the price, plus an ultra-low weight.

Getting your PC to meaningfully accept voice commands or dictation has been a benchmark for futuristic computing since time immemorial. Dragon NaturallySpeaking (DNS for short) has been a leader in the field for some time now, and is rapidly becoming devoid of competition.

The Creative PC-CAM 850 is a 2-megapixel digital camera geared to double up as a Webcam and a camcorder. Priced at a low $279, it hosts an impressive 16MB of built-in memory, writes to both MMC and SD card media and also has S-Video output.

A welcome update to the Sound Blaster that can deliver perceptibly better audio than onboard chips, but it goes beyond most people’s needs for PC audio.

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

Over the last few years there is no doubt mainstream PCs have leant increasingly towards visual applications. The power of visually communicating has grown in acceptance as more and more products and applications reach fruition.

A decent LCD in its own right, but the speakers are poor and the dock isn’t much more than an expensive gimmick.

The TViX is a fairly small box, roughly about the same size as a good DVD box-set, but inside it's got some amazing smarts. This also technically isn't a media streamer as such - it's more a media cacher thanks to the 80GB hard drive inside.