Best Products of 1999

Not to be alarmist, but we recommend you savor these 17th annual World Class Awards--because they could be our last. According to a rumor flying around PC World's offices, our brains are not Y2K-compliant. Therefore, when the calendar changes at year's end, we may be reviewing products like it was 1900. Can you imagine what your great-grandparents would have made of the Palm IIIx?

Seriously now, that's the last you'll hear of millennial madness for the next several pages. Despite the media furor over the Y2K bug, the past year saw a lot of other developments worth getting excited about: An eight-year-old operating system called Linux was born; PC prices fell to the point where it wasn't so crazy to pay in cash; and Big Brother carved out some space on the new Intel Pentium III processor so he could follow you around the Web.

Amid all this excitement, PC World's editors, testers, and contributors examined a universe of products, Web sites, and companies. For weeks, we squabbled over which ones were the best. In the end, we crowned some previous unknowns (Amorphium and the Castlewood Orb drive come to mind), as well as some old favorites (Dell's Dimension PCs and Adobe Photoshop). And caught up in the spirit of giving, we couldn't resist handing out brickbats for some of the past year's more dubious achievements (see "The No-Class Awards" ).

But enough with the idle pleasantries. It's time to recognize the final World Class honorees of the '90s--that's the 1990s, not the 1890s.