Best Computer Products

Every month PC World rates over a hundred products in over two dozen categories. Whether you're looking for a new digital camera or notebook, a hard drive or monitor, here are our picks from the cream of the crop.

Aoife McEvoy

Best Entertainment PC

The $2999 Gateway 700XL will keep gamers, digital camera junkies, and home-movie makers happy for hours. Our Test Center analysts were impressed with how its fancy 18-inch LCD monitor displayed photographs, DVD movies, and game sequences.

Best Power PC

If you need a speed demon for work chores and fun at home--and you're prepared to spend over $3000--Dell's Dimension 8250 could be your dream machine. This price includes a fancy 21-inch monitor, a DVD-ROM drive, and a DVD+RW/+R drive.

Best Value PC

ABS's Bravado 2300 will please anyone who's shopping for a budget system. It's fast and cheap--just over $1000. The system is very easy to set up, and text looks sharp on the 17-inch monitor.

Best Corporate PC

Who says office machines are bland and boring? Compaq's black and silver Evo D510 Convertible Minitower is speedy and roomy, making potential upgrades easy. The $2127 system can handle two monitors simultaneously.

Best Power Notebook

Want Bluetooth capabilities and Wi-Fi networking? Big Blue's ThinkPad T30 has it all built in. The notebook weighs just under 7 pounds--very light compared with other contenders. But IBM's price is almost $3000.

Best Value Notebook

We like Dell's $1777 Inspiron 4150 for its design: It's comfortable to use and the components are easily accessible. In our tests, the battery lasted for almost three hours--longer than some of the power laptops.

Best Camera, $500 and Over

The $500 Nikon Coolpix 4300 takes superb shots. Image quality is outstanding, and you can easily hold the camera with one hand. This 4-megapixel unit weighs just over 10 ounces.

Best CD-RW Drive

Yearning for a superfast burner? The TDK 48X VeloCD beats the competition with its performance in writing to both CD-R and CD-RW. Its $90 price tag is attractive too.

Best Rewritable DVD Drive

Sony's $349 DRU-500A debuts as the first drive to support both-RW and +RW formats. It's a fast burner, and it comes with an excellent software package, including Sonic's MyDVD 4.

Best Power Graphics Board

It may have a long-winded name, but the Leadtek WinFast A250 Ultra TD-MyVIVO is a feast for gaming and video fiends. The $260 board is one of the fastest cards the PC World Test Center has ever tested. Its excellent software package includes Ulead Video Studio 6 and Rogue Spear: Black Thorn games.

Best Value Graphics Board

The MSI GMX440-VTP is fast for its class, but the board has another great thing going for it--its $80 price.

Best Hard Drive

The Maxtor Retail Drive 200GB blew away all other hard drives in performance testing. It's spacious, but rather pricey at $299.

Best 19-Inch CRT Monitor

Samsung's $370 SyncMaster 957mb pleases the eye with its crystal-clear text and vibrant graphics. Plus, this flat screen's menu controls are easy to use.

Best 17-Inch LCD Monitor

For a few hundred dollars more than a 19-inch CRT, you could go for Samsung's slim and stylish SyncMaster 172T LCD monitor. The silver-bezel display offers fabulous quality for both text and images. The price? $680.

Best Ink Jet Printer

HP's affordable Deskjet 5550 might be the one for you if you want a printer to handle photos. In our tests on the $152 HP printer, photos with a lot of detail looked terrific on glossy paper--among the best results we've seen to date.

Best Color Laser Printer

If the promise of thick, dark, crisp text appeals to you, you can't go wrong with Oki Data's Oki C7200n for just over $2000. While this color laser is really fast, colors pumped out on the bright side in our tests.

Best Scanner

If you need speed and high-quality color and black-and-white images, the $179 Epson Perfection 1660 Photo delivers.

Best PDA

The elegant Sony Clie PEG-NR70V uses the Palm operating system and comes with a built-in camera, a handy integrated keyboard, and a swiveling screen. Expect to buy the Clie for a bit less than Sony's advertised $599 price.

Best Wireless Phone

At $200, the Sony Ericsson T68 is cheap for what you get. This compact phone sports a joystick navigation button, a color screen, and world roaming capabilities.