In order to control distribution of movies and prevent piracy, many most DVDs are region protected to ensure that they cannot be played outside of their region of issue. In short, this means you can't play American DVDs on an Australian player and vice versa. To further complicate the matter, PC and notebook DVD drives are locked to the least region set with DVD drives correspondingly locked after five changes of region code by the user.

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.

Slightly older model, but the best 42in TV you can buy, full stop. Not cheap, but the quality is all up there on the screen

New plant to upgrade existing capacity, analysts suggest.

Blu-ray takes another tentative step towards the mass market, but is now the time to buy?

Blu-ray takes another tentative step towards the mass market, but is now the time to buy?

An older TV, but in its day one of the best picture performances we'd ever seen

If you must have the biggest, it’s great – but lose a couple of inches and you’ll get an even better performance

Expensive but extraordinary. If God watches the telly, he does it on one of these

Blu-ray and HD DVD players will come out fighting this year. We reveal which format is best placed to be DVD’s successor.

A poor performer in the face of HP’s similarly-priced, touch screen-enabled rival.

Terrific value and a high-quality set – it’s not Full HD, but at this price, you won’t miss it

An older model, and not the best 50in Pioneer, but still better than every other 50in on the planet in its day. If you can’t manage the top-end Pioneer, this is the set to go for

The Pioneer DreamBook Power 900 is a locally built monster – this isn’t a desktop replacement, it’s a desk.

Make your slideshow from any JPEG file - camera original or edited. TVwriter is a Windows program...

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

A fine TV that offers a rich, warm picture but comes up just a tiny bit short against rival sets from Sony and Philips

If laptops were cars, then the Pioneer Power 470 would be a caravan - a quick scan of the specs reveals that it has almost everything. The 470 model we tested was a 3.06GHz Pentium 4 unit with a large 60GB of drive space and 256MB of DDR.

We’ve seen several manufacturers make use of FIC’s Spectra case before, but few have made such a good job of it as Pioneer.

Any way you look at it, ITC’s Millennia 7350 is a monster.