Bill Howard

For playing MP3 music on your stereo and showing digital photos on your TV, the Linksys Wireless-B Media Adapter is the new front-runner among digital media hubs. For $200 (street), the Wireless-B offers essentially the same functions as the HP Wireless Digital Media Receiver ew5000 does for $100 more. And although the Wireless-B has a […]

How many gigs of music, photo, and video files are you storing on your PCs hard drive? Uh-huh, we are too. Thats why home entertainment hubs make so much sense. This new type of gadget serves as a bridge between your PC and your AV equipment, allowing you to experience your digital media in a […]

With portable PCs doing so many tasks once reserved for desktops, it was only a matter of time before a notebook computer doubled as a Windows Media Center Edition (MCE) PC. First out is the Toshiba Satellite 5205-S705 ($2,699 direct). Like the first MCE desktop machines of last fall, the weak spot is the TV […]

The MP3 player market is thoroughly fleshed out, even if many of the players are still somewhat clunky: Try to name all the insanely great players besides the iPod. Its time to declare victory for the iPod and move on to the next big thing in personal entertainment. That may well be the personal video […]

Six months ago, cd3os media hub would have been a breathtaking product with a couple of quirks. Now, the cd3o c300 Network MP3 Player ($249 direct), which transports MP3, WMA, and WAV files from your PC to your stereo receiver, may get lost in the buzz about products from better-known names like Hewlett-Packard. And it […]

Notebooks below $1,000 may grab your attention, but features can get a bit light. If youre willing to let the price float up a few hundred dollars, youll get far more for your money. With the Dell Inspiron 5100 desktop replacement notebook ($1,456 direct, as tested), for instance, you get productivity software, decent multimedia abilities, […]

Road warriors whose needs center on images, music, and video should pay close attention to the $2,098 (list) Apple PowerBook G4 12-Inch, the smallest PowerBook yet. This PowerBook has no significant drawbacks despite its small size, and its multimedia capabilities are just about the best you can expect from a small notebook. Inside the 1.2-by-10.9-by-8.6-inch […]

The Logitech Cordless Presenter ($180 street) is the Vegematic of presentation remotes. Not only is it a remote presentation controller, but it also becomes a cordless optical desktop mouse when you flip a button and slide the device on any flat surface. Since this is a Logitech product, you know the design is gorgeous. The […]

Remember the sense of freedom and convenience you experienced the first time you burned a music or data CD on your laptop? Now you can do the same with DVDs. The Toshiba Satellite 5205-S703 ($2,700 street), lets you burn video and data to a notebook DVD drive. This Satellite is a big, gorgeous, do-everything multimedia […]

Notebook buyers who can live with 1 to 2 hours of battery life are snapping up portables built around Intels desktop PC processors (as opposed to Intels mobile CPUs); this yields fine performance and saves up to $250 in the bargain. One of the first units with the desktop 3.06-GHz Pentium 4 (with HyperThreading) is […]