The HP Pavilion a5060a is a great all-round PC for anyone who's after a no fuss out-of-the-box solution. The removable hard drive bay allows for some added utility and there are options for some essential upgrades down the track.

We like the trend towards a power saving focus, though there's little we can attribute to this machine that hasn't been used before. Regardless, it's a promising step forward. Performance-wise this machine does well, though the lack of e-SATA and FireWire is a shame.

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.

For LAN gamers this is a great choice, but its limited upgrade options may put some people off.

It's not the best performer in its price range and there's some limitation on its upgradeability. Even with a TV tuner, the price just doesn't compare to what many other systems offer.

If you don't mind the BTX case, which won't let you easily upgrade your motherboard in the future, then this system is worth considering.

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.

If it's been a while since you have upgraded, you'll be blown away by the performance. Only 70GB of storage is probably not enough for most people's long-term needs, but that aside, this is a very powerful machine for under $2000.

While it seems this unit only goes halfway to being a good media centre, at $1999 it’s a tidy little package that will perform above and beyond the normal needs of the average user, even if it doesn’t top the charts.

Overall, the Aspire is definitely worth considering. It performed adequately in our tests, it's user-friendly, it comes with a big monitor and it looks good. It's great value, despite its poor graphics card, but this component can easily be replaced with a better model at a latter date.

NEC's Great White Hope comes equipped with some interesting features, but ultimately it fails to deliver on several fronts. Beneath its dazzling array of style hides a run-of-the-mill PC equipped with average components. With that being said, the trendy set will love it.

Overall, this isn't a bad system, but it's a little over-designed. For example, the bays for HP's media drives aren't really necessary, they just take up space. But the PC does have a lot of useful connectivity options and also looks quite nice. It's a decent home PC that can also double as a media centre.