A great little unit with plenty of processing power. It's perfect for image and video editing and won't cost you too much.

Its low power consumption, Gigabit Ethernet and small footprint mean its best use is probably as a PC for an Internet cafe. Home users might also want to consider it as a second PC for basic tasks, but office users might want to shy away from it due to its lack of an optical drive.

This PC is worthy of consideration if you want something zippy and good-looking, not to mention easy to maintain and upgrade, for the office.

This business PC has an enticing price tag and is useful for multitasking, but it needs much better graphics capabilities.

The Sony VAIO Panel PC VGCLT28G is certainly a feature-packed unit. Sporting a Blu-ray writer and the latest connectivity options, the main thing holding the unit back is its very high price tag. But if you feel the need to streamline your home entertainment environment, and you’re wealthy enough to care about capital gains taxation, then this may be the unit for you.

A relatively new-breed PC with an intuitive touch-screen interface that would be just as useful in an office as in a home environment.

Big, bold and perhaps beautiful to some, the XPS 730 is a heavy-duty machine with plenty of heart. It could use faster graphics card options, but its twin-8800GTs should do a reasonable job of satisfying most gaming urges.

For a basic business computing environment, the Extensa E261 Standard is ideal. It's inexpensive, it won't consume too much electricity, and yet it will still run most office applications swiftly.

This PC is certainly worthy of consideration if you're after a powerful and well-featured PC that can also be used as a media centre. Users who want to edit high-definition movies will appreciate the 2TB of hard drive space and the inclusion of a Blu-ray writer.

Running a VIA CPU and the gPC operating system, this definitely isn't a typical PC. It's useful for running basic office applications and Web browsing, but that's about it.

All up, apart from the ugly remote control receiver, this unit is good looking enough to be placed in the lounge room as a media centre, and it's small enough to be used as a desktop PC even in the most cramped environments.