Stories by: Jesse Sutton

With a strong focus on family use, entertainment and media management, the HP Pavilion M9190a is a good choice for homes with plenty of digital media. The combination of its Blu-ray/HD-DVD player with LightScribe DVD functionality, 15-in-1 media card reader, TV-tuner and its easy to use Media Drives make this PC very handy to have for the media-oriented household.

Filling the mid-range gap

Named after a Japanese sword, the "Kodachi", Lenovo's new ThinkPad X300 is indeed both slim and sharp, and offers some of the latest in notebook technology with one of the smallest chassis available on the market. It's not fair to call it a competitor for the MacBook Air, but the X300 is a very attractive alternative if you're more concerned with function than you are with style.

The Lenovo ThinkCentre M57 (6072-ADM) uses Lenovo's standard form factor chassis, and dons the tried and tested black and red colour scheme. It isn't a great performer, but it does offer some extra connectivity, such as e-SATA, making it a good choice for users with large local backup needs.

Fujitsu has released yet another ultraportable business notebook, this time it's the LifeBook P8010, a small, stylish ultraportable weighing just 1.35kg. Although it launched together with the tiny Fujitsu LifeBook U1010 (see the video review here), it's a slightly larger product that competes with notebooks like the Toshiba Portege R500 and to a lesser extent the MacBook Air.

Despite its poorly chosen name (more on that later), the MSI GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB is a very nice card that will suit gamers looking for an affordable interim card with some punch. On this iteration of the 8800 GTS 512MB, the NX8800GTS-T2D512E-OC, MSI has chosen to overclock the core and shader frequencies for a little extra kick.

Trend Micro's latest security and antivirus release, Internet Security Pro 2008, offers a clean interface that's simple to navigate and fairly straightforward to set up.

Jesse Sutton takes a look at Fujitsu's amazingly compact UMPC - the new Lifebook U1010

Jesse Sutton takes a look at Toshiba's latest addition to its Portege range of notebooks - the R400

Ruggedised notebooks were once the domain of just a handful of specialised manufacturers, but recently they've become more popular. Today it's not uncommon for long-time manufacturers of business and consumer-style notebooks to produce toughened notebook models, as well as other devices and peripherals.

The HP Pavilion Elite m9090a PC is the second PC we've tested that includes a combination HD-DVD and Blu-ray drive, allowing users to play movies from either format.