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

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

A stylish all-in-one media centre that effortlessly handles all tasks thrown at it. But it’s disgracefully priced.

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

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

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

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.

The Hi-Grade Xperian can simply be described as a bundle of essential technology ingeniously put together in one desirable package.

Great design and comprehensive features make it a truly great Media Center PC. Only the price lets it down.

Chunky, powerful and intimidating. Everything you want in a PC, but not what you'd want in a media centre.

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

The ASUS is one tough little cookie. Its cover and palmrest are encased in brushed aluminium lending the unit a reassuring sense of rigidity and roadworthiness. The 15.4" screen is bright, and its default resolution of 1680x1050 makes text sharp but a little small to read unless up close. The unit also comes with a built in TV-tuner, and also sports a TV-antenna output.

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.

Eye-catching and very well designed, the new iMac is an excellent all-in-one PC system.

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.

Dual-core and Windows Vista make it into our A-List’s Value PC category.

Nvidia’s 8800 GTX graphics card is the crowning glory of this very-fast, great-value, PC.

A stunning way to enjoy HD DVD, but the wonderful design and features come at a price

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

When it comes to accessories, the Aspire has one of the best bundles supplied for this roundup: including an MCE remote and a radio/TV antenna! It also has a decent specification list: 3Ghz Pentium 4; 160GB HDD; and 512MB RAM. The only sticking point here, amongst all this multimedia goodness, is the inclusion of the Mobility X300 video card. It's like building a Ferrari and installing a two-stroke motor. It doesn't make much sense.