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Top 100: Modern PCs or Museum Pieces?

Current models on our charts illustrate how far systems and devices have come in the past two decades.

The Reviews Staff

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Argue all you want about bloated operating systems and software, but you have to admit that 20 years of product development have made personal computers exponentially better. The Toshiba Satellite 5205-S703 laptop leading our Top 15 Notebooks chart and the Gateway Media Center PC 500 at the head of this month's Top 5 Entertainment PCs chart are good examples of how computers have improved.

Peripherals have fared well, too: Our top digital camera, the Olympus C-5050 Zoom, takes vibrant pictures--unlike its color-challenged ancestor, the gray-scale Logitech FotoMan, which debuted in 1992.

Freelance writers Mick Lockey and Carla Thornton, and PC World reviews editors Tracey Capen, Sean Captain, Rebecca Freed, Alexandra Krasne, Kalpana Narayanamurthi, Melissa J. Perenson, and Alan Stafford contributed to the Top 100 this month. Ulrike Diehlmann, Julio Giannobile, Elliott Kirschling, Jeff Kuta, Tony K. Leung, and Thomas Luong performed testing, with support by Julian Weatherby.
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