When it comes to notebooks, there are a few different flavours with their own specialties.  The trick to purchasing the right notebook is to know your needs and the intended purposes of the unit so you can properly match the correct machine with your requirements.

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.

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.

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.

Blistering speed in 3D and a multitude of multimedia features makes the 3500 an excellent card for video enthusiasts and gamers alike.

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.

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.

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.

The Inspiron 630m is Dell’s first 14-inch widescreen notebook.

The days of featureless notebooks are over. Adam Turner hunts down the latest entertainment notebooks on the market.

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.

If you're after an ultra portable, this isn't the notebook for you. If you're after a large form factored portable desktop replacement, this could be the ticket. This behemoth of a notebook features a 17-inch widescreen display and a footprint to match.

Small form factor (SFF) PCs now have their foot well and truly in the home entertainment and IT/CE crossover market due largely to their aesthetics, functionality and quietness of operating volume. Westan's Biostar product looks to continue along these lines, offering a multimedia PC with all the performance of AMD's 64-bit desktop processor architecture.

M18 chips aimed at multimedia mobile phones.

The Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia has been a mainstay of electronic educational resources for many years: I remember it being bundled with the first 386 I bought back in the early nineties, and was impressed back then at the video and audio clips, maps and information contained on the CD.

The new Nokia n96 has just about every multimedia trick, including TV, video, and an online music store, that the Finns can throw at it. It's a beast of a phone, and we mean that as a compliment.

Director 8 Shockwave Studio is now the platform of choice for those sites determined to provide the richest possible Web experience

The audio component of the PC multimedia revolution has for many years been sorely neglected, with many new computers supplied with speakers that are quite simply terrible. Little plastic speakers can

Impressive and free antivirus and antispyware package

You really have to look to the 17-inch giants like the HP Pavilion zd8001AP to find machines that were designed as multimedia beasts from the ground up.