A barebones Athlon mobo, the AK39N has enough functionality to set this board apart as an ideal platform for building a home PC or workstation.

There are many things that are given the 'instant' moniker, but usually products from the IT world are not among their number. Slow PC boot times (whatever happened to instant-on PCs?) and a whole mess of configurations takes the instant gratification out of most technology...

The VIA KT400A chipset forms the foundation of the KT4A Ultra-FISR motherboard. Unlike the two other MSI boards in this roundup, the KT4A only supports SATA, and not IDE, RAID.

BenQs small 1.3-megapixel camera is a stylish pearl coloured affair, and is one of the tiniest cameras that PC Authority has reviewed so far (aside, coincidentally, from the BenQ 300mini we reviewed in May 2002, page 81).

The brand new HC100 from Mitsubishi Electric is a more traditional looking home theatre projector with a centremounted lens, and curved lines.

The PE5120 from BenQ is a native widescreen projector, and while it’s happiest displaying DVDs and home theatre inputs it also performed well with desktop and text projection.

A high quality projector to finish it all off, the Optoma EP739 scored respectably in just about every aspect of every test thrown at it.

While 64-bit computing has been around for a while (for the two of you who could afford Intel's Itanium, and now Itanium II processors), the dream of 64-bittery for the humble home system has been a long time coming.

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.

Just over four months on from our massive hard drive roundup (October 2002, page 74), and Serial ATA (SATA) hard disks have finally arrived. Phew.