Is your PC the stable, error-free platform you need? We didn't think so. Leigh Dyer, David Kidd and Ty Pendlebury present the essential guide to fixing your PC.

The Aspire is a very good unit with several features which enhance its usability. It will suit on-the-go entertainment and productivity, at a price that won't burn your wallet.

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.

How can you make OEM products work for you? Ty Pendlebury looks at how these three letters can help save you money.

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

PVX is designed as an office application but could as easily appeal to people wanting to make personal video calls.

The $1000 PC was once regarded as the Holy Grail of computing, but now almost every manufacturer has one.

The Twinhead Efio is a mixed beast. It has some very good features, such as an all-magnesium casing and ATI Mobility 9700, but it also has some middling features, like a relatively slow 1.8GHz Intel processor and 4:3 screen. The unit is well made and well set out however.

The BenQ Joybook 7000 v07 is a multimedia PC with some MCE-like abilities. It comes loaded with QMedia Center - another MCE clone - and a PCMCIA-sized remote. QMedia operates much like MCE in that there is a main page – coloured BenQ purple of course - from which the usual Pictures and Videos icons enable navigation of the user’s media files.

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 Acer Aspire has a lot of handy multimedia functions that help it work as a desktop replacement/media unit. One of the Aspire’s main selling points is the Arcade feature, which is a Windows Media Centre clone. A button on the notebook fascia opens Arcade, bypassing the Windows OS and enabling all media player functions: DVD, MP3 etc. It works quite well but isn’t as graphically stunning as MCE.

The IBM ThinkCentre S50 Ultra Small is the world's smallest 'full-function' desktop computer according to manufacturer IBM. Whether it's the world's smallest or not, it's certainly one of the smallest we've seen.

The Acer Aspire SA20 is a machine built on a budget and it performs accordingly.

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.

Finding a good PC or notebook for the family is not as hard as you might think. PC Authority  puts the latest models to the test.

We know you want to play games, so we've put 18 PCI Express graphics cards under the microscope to see who really does the job the best.

Nominating Sato as our winner for the desktop machines this month was fairly straightforward, especially when compared to deciding the outcome of the closely-fought notebook war. Because, even though the Sato was outdone by one or two systems in terms of performance, nothing beat it on pure value for money.