It’s what the professional audio market has to offer podcasters and budding musicians -- but quality comes at a cost.

Absolutely blitzing the competition, Altech takes out our highly coveted Labs Winner Award, just beating IBM to the top spot. Heavy on both the features and quality, this unit was one of only three units in the roundup to feature a 17in TFT display, with the others, the Pluscorp INTEQ V26 and Apple iMac, falling by the wayside on price, hardware spec and performance.

While you might not immediately think of Apple when it comes to business workstations, the iMac is a solid self-contained package, and does appeal to this market.

Dell has seen considerable success in the consumer PC market, and has drawn on the expertise gained in that market to drive into the business market over the past several years.

WinZip has become the most popular archival program used on the Windows platform, and it’s good to see some serious innovation in this revision.

The IBM NetVista M42 business PC offers a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 with 256MB DDR RAM and a 40GB hard disk.

Businesses have come to rely on Acer workstations for their stability and usability without a huge price tag, and this system easily fulfills these requirements.

To be fair, if you were going to deploy Netware 6, you would have a trained Novell engineer (CNE) configure it on a Netware 6-certified box from a major manufacturer. We, nevertheless, decided to wipe our Windows 2000 clone server and start afresh with Netware.

Dells all-black PowerEdge is certainly one of the coolest-looking systems of the bunch, but the 600SC also packs enough power to be a formidable SMB server

Once you get past the Taurus extremely small form factor and use it, its best feature becomes apparent: its ease of use.

Emagens entry is a fairly mixed system, with some excellent and some average features

This rather unusual system from MCT has a bit of everything.

3Coms AirConnect is one of the high-speed wireless LAN (WLAN) contenders, combining three PC Card network interface cards and a base station. The AirConnect cards dont inspire confidence, as the aerial assembly isnt securely fixed to the card body. 3Com looks to have remedied this with the release of the new XJACK cards (estimated at $400 each). These cards have a pop-up antenna and are less prone to breaking off the card.

Acer has sacrificed overall power in favour of features with this moderate little system.