Altech's Maestro Pro is a Home Theatre PC based on Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005.

When everything from your movie collection to your photo album is digital, why would you want to watch it all on a tiny monitor with tinny speakers while your big television and surround sound sits idle in the lounge room?

We dubbed the ASUS ‘The Black Box’ because, like its aeronautical namesake, it records everything.

Apple’s 17-inch PowerBook G4 is a thing of beauty, shaming the other 17- inch notebooks with its size, weight and design – perhaps with the exception of the ASUS.

Not all multimedia notebooks have to weigh in around the $5000 mark. Digital Star’s 15.4in widescreen PowerNote Z71V offers very good value for money for a laptop sporting a 2GHz Pentium M, 1GB of RAM and a 128MB NVIDIA GeForce Go 6600 graphics chip.

The Toshiba Satellite P30 is a 17-inch behemoth with a price tag to match.

The Omega Viewmaster Portiva 5Z71 is another notebook comprising of tradeoffs; the blistering Pentium-M 2GHz processor offset by an NVIDIA GeForce Go660 graphics card with only 64MB of video memory, accompanied by the smallest hard drive of the bunch.

You really have to look to the 17-inch giants like the HP Pavilion zd8001AP to find machines that were designed as multimedia beasts from the ground up.