After the launch of the latest Acrobat a few months ago, everything went quiet on the Adobe front. It's now clear what the company was working on, with the simultaneous launch of each of its main creative design packages -- Photoshop/ImageReady, Illustrator, InDesign and GoLive. (Please see individual reviews of all of these packages on this month's cover CD.)

Computer mice are arguably the best thing since sliced bread - for computer users anyway - until you try to draw with one.

Video editing can make or break those home movies of your latest adventure or that important business presentation. Until recently you only had the choice of some expensive professional, or some fairly crude software packages, but over recent years Ulead has put video editing within the reach of most video camera users, and at a reasonable price.

Slim, good-looking and affordable – and you can even work outside in sunlight. Just note the niggles.

The Quadro FX3000 is based on the same NV35 core that powers the latest GeForce FX 5900 cards, but with a few new additions to cater to the professional market. Compared to the older Quadro FX2000, which was based on the NV30, or GeForce FX5800, the FX3000 has double the memory, at 256MB, as well as a 256-bit memory interface, giving double the theoretical graphics bandwidth, hitting just over 27GB/s. It also supports other features from the NV35, including a 128-bit floating-point precision graphics pipeline, 128-bit colour, 12-bit sub-pixel accuracy, 16x full-scene anti-aliasing, 3D volumetric textures, and of course support for all the latest OpenGL, DirectX and NVIDIA’s own Cg graphics language versions.

An improved working environment and ground-breaking colour handling make Illustrator fresher than ever.

New effects enable richer design results, while a host of other improvements boost productivity.

An extremely well built and comfortable machine, blessed with striking looks and a great price.

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

The Quark-killer has finally landed. For the last year, the hype about Adobe's replacement for the worthy but old-fashioned PageMaker (reviewed issue 22, p108) has been building to fever pitch.

Symantec’s latest offering is lighter than ever and an extremely effective security package. And get this, a RAM footprint smaller than Kaspersky

A new interface, smart albums, guided editing and photo merging keep Photoshop Elements ahead of the pack

True Image provides a simple but effective disaster-recovery system, with useful data backup facilities.

An impressive stand, but quality remains average.

Looking more like a corporate slimline desktop than a barebones system, this unit features a Mini ITX motherboard while the large form allows for good component layout. Minimal overlap between the motherboard and optical drives allows for free working space even around the CPU and RAM.

Hitachi’s ingeniously hinged screwdriver is your flexible friend when it comes to awkward screws and looks remarkably like a Halo 3 gun

A genuine step forward for the laptop, with unbelievable capabilities for the price, plus an ultra-low weight.

It might seem unfair comparing MYOB’s best selling single user product with Quicken’s multi-user small business accounting package, but the key difference between the two is number of licences and not the functionality.

Hitachi VM-D965LE Video

When Macromedia released the first Dreamweaver almost three years ago it was welcomed with open arms by professional Web developers.