Top 15 Home PCs

MicronPC earns the power Best Buy this month with its new Millennia XP+ Xtreme, which zoomed to a PC WorldBench 4 score of 123--second-fastest on the chart. The system includes high-end components, such as a 120GB hard drive, a DVD-RW drive, and a GeForce4 graphics card with 128MB of RAM. The Millennia XP+ Xtreme also has terrific documentation: Unlike some other home PCs, it ships with a thick system manual with illustrations and troubleshooting information.

The Dell Dimension 2200 debuts at number three on our value chart. Designed for home offices, the system comes with a 1.3-GHz Celeron processor and 256MB of RAM, and it includes Microsoft Works Suite 2002. Even though it has an affordable $829 price, it still comes with a speedy 24X/10X/40X CD-RW drive, and its Dell E771P 17-inch monitor displays text and images well.

Sony has two new multimedia systems on our chart, one on each side. At $2849, the VAIO PCV-RX690G lands in sixth on our power list; it packs the latest 2.2-GHz Pentium 4 processor, a DVD-RW drive, and a 19-inch Trinitron monitor. Sony also throws in a Memory Stick media slot, for those who use its flash-storage cards, and a Giga Pocket Personal Video Recorder, which lets you record TV shows as you watch, save them to the PC's huge hard drive, or burn them to DVDs. Sony's low-priced model, the PCV-RX640, hits number six on the value side. It trades in the DVD-RW drive for a 16X/10X/40X CD-RW drive, and it lacks the Memory Stick slot and the TV recorder. But its 1.3-GHz Celeron processor helped it earn an adequate PC WorldBench 4 score of 91, and at $999, the price is great.