The Athlon XP 3200+ will probably be the last Barton-core desktop processor to come from AMD before the launch later this year of the Athlon 64, its desktop 64-bit processor.

It’s an odd gambit business-wise: align your own brand with that of another. But for Acer, the one-off team-up with Ferrari to brand and produce the Acer Ferrari 3000 notebook has resulted in a stunning product.

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.

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.

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.

The Viewsonic airPanel V110 is the first of its kind – a wireless, portable display that unfetters you from your PC and allows you to work around the home and office while your PC sits in another room. It runs Windows CE for Smart Panels which is like a pared-down version of Windows XP, and mimics your system desktop allowing you to access files and programs without needing to be next to your PC.

Adobe has been riding high on the success of the portable document format (PDF), and the Acrobat creation tools needed to generate them. Later in the year version 6.0 will be launched, but in the meantime we have a preview of Acrobat Professional 6.0 Beta.

With the prevalence of Net connections and all the good things a connected society brings such as community, the ability to share ideas and the openness of information, comes the flipside of digital life -- hackers, spyware, viruses and spam.

The o2 Xphone is one of the first phones in Australia to use Microsoft's new embedded SmartPhone 2003 OS, which is a highly, highly pared down and customised version of Windows XP. Anyone familiar with the Windows interface shouldn't have much trouble operating this phone. Having said that however, it does take some getting used to when navigating the menu systems, but it doesn't actually take long to get up to speed.

Will home media centres do to the entertainment industry what video did to the radio star? With new technology reshaping our lounges, homes could soon become fully functional media hubs.

HITACHI DZ-MV208E

We see a lot of notebooks at PC Authority, but like the BenQ JoyBook 8000 (page 37), the Portege 2010 was an immediate crowd pleaser when it was removed from it's shipping materials, garnering lots of "oohs" and "aahs" from techies and non-techies alike.

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.

The 650 really picks up where the 600 left off, and while it doesn't look too different to the eye, many of the changes are under the hood or subtle manipulations of the 600's design. It runs the new Palm OS 5.4 and has a much faster 312MHz Intel PXA270 processor, but the most immediate difference is the screen: it's now double the resolution at 320 x 320.

The Excel G736 notebook from Protac is a desktop replacement, and as well as better-than-normal notebook specifications it also comes with the other traditional trapping of a desktop replacement notebook: it's big, it's chunky, and it's heavy.

This tiny notebook, measuring a mere 26.5 x 22 x 2.1cm looks quite ordinary on the outside, yet comes with quite an interesting processor inside. The Valeo CP10 is not powered by Intel or AMD, nor even Transmeta, but instead has one of the first VIA Antaur CPUs we've come across.

Looking quite a lot like what I imagined the son of Apple's Titanium and Powerbook lines of notebooks would turn out, the AStone notebook features both the Titanium's solid matte silver magnesium-alloy body with the Powerbook's white limned styling. From the very outset this makes the AStone one visually appealing notebook.