New in the Top 100

The eyes have it: Sleek flat-panel monitors come into focus for buyers on a budget.

Your Guide to the Top 100

Questions about our charts? The following information should answer them.

How do the charts work? Each month we test a large number of PCs, printers, monitors, graphics boards, CD-RW drives, scanners, and digital cameras and compare them with previously reviewed products. Only the best products land on the charts, which are refreshed monthly. System configurations are shown as tested. Vendors may have since changed components.

What does the overall rating mean? This 100-point scale reflects results from our hands-on evaluations and performance tests. A score in the 90s is exceptional, while one in the 70s is above average.

What does the PC WorldBench 2000 score mean? It's a measure of how fast a PC can run a mix of common business applications as compared with our baseline machine, an HP Pavilion 8380 with a PII-400 CPU, 96MB of RAM, and an 8GB hard drive. For example, a PC that scores 200 is twice as fast as the baseline system.

Where do the scores for reliability, support quality, and support policies come from? Reliability and support quality scores are based on surveys of PC World readers and on anonymous support calls made by PC World staff. The policies score is based on vendor support policies.