New in the Top 100

For this month's reviews of systems and peripherals, click the links below.

• Power PCs
  
  
• Value PCs
  
  
• Notebook PCs
  
  
• Home PCs
  
  
• Monitors
  
  
• Graphic Boards
  
  
• CD-RW Drives
  
  
• Digital Cameras
  
  

When it comes to monitors, bigger is usually better. Investing in a bigger monitor can change the way you work, allowing you to use higher resolutions and see more of your images or documents on screen at once. That's why this month's monitors chart looks at 21- and 22-inchers. These giants of the monitor world have a reputation for being heavy, expensive space hogs, but as with most other computer products, their prices have been falling. Take, for instance, Samsung's SyncMaster 1200NF, which debuts this month in first place on our Top 10 Monitors chart. This behemoth, with its huge 19.9-inch viewable screen area and diagonal .24-millimeter dot pitch, earned scores of Very Good and Excellent, respectively, in our tests of text and graphics quality. Although the SyncMaster's price of $824 is significantly higher than what you would pay for a smaller monitor (many 17-inch models now cost between $200 and $300), that extra screen area can make a big difference to those who want to see a lot of data displayed at one time.

1 GHz: Top Speed, High Tariff

Last month, we looked at five of the first notebooks based on Intel's new 1-GHz mobile Pentium III chip. Those systems scored new highs on our PC WorldBench 2000 tests, although the improvement over the mean score for PIII-850 notebooks was only 4 percent.

This month we reviewed the HP Omnibook 6000 for our Top 10 Notebook PCs chart. The new 1-GHz Omnibook has many desirable features, including a high-resolution 15-inch screen and a 30GB hard drive, and it's fast, earning a score of 168 on our PC WorldBench 2000 performance tests. However, it failed to place on the chart because at $4099, it's too expensive. Its impressive features and high speed are not enough to compensate for its high cost.

The built-in aerials for 802.11b wireless networking represent yet another intriguing trend in notebooks. A number of vendors now build aerials into their notebooks, so adding wireless networking simply involves adding a Mini PCI wireless network card. This solution also frees up a PC Card slot for other uses. The first two notebooks with built-in aerials to appear on our Top 15 chart are the Dell Latitude C800 (number two on the power chart) and the Latitude C600 (the number one Best Buy on the midrange chart).

Dell Tech-Support Issues?

A recent uptick in the number of complaints about Dell's customer support is a surprise--the company has been a longtime fixture at the top of our reader-based Reliability and Service surveys. Although the company's Good support rating remains unchanged for the time being, we are keeping a close eye on the mail to see if this is a short-term support problem (caused in part by the launch of Windows Me) or a long-term change at Dell. We are also running another Reliability and Service survey. Stay tuned.

Micron announced in March that it will sell its PC business, MicronPC.com. Though the Micron brand will continue, we have no indication yet as to how the changes might affect Micron customers. We will keep an eye on the revamped company to see how capably it performs.