Worst Complete Home PC Manufacturer: E-machines™ — They ripped off the IMac™ all in one design. They didn’t have the guts to put the quality parts inside though. E-machines™ are unreliable, low quality, and poorly constructed. The parts are no name components with even less performance. Their high end machines are jokes. E-machines™ make better paper weights then home computers.

Best Commercial/Workstation Complete PC/Server Manufacturer: Dell™ — Surprised? Us neither. The top of the line Dell™ workstations feature powerful Xenon Pentium III™ processors. They have Ultra ATA hard disks. Incredible graphics and sound cards. What more could you want? Okay, they are also nicely built and tested. Good deal (and pricey too). Their servers are fast, built with expandability, and are highly scalable. Very cool (and pricey once again).

Worst Commercial/Work Complete PC/Server Manufacturer: Compaq™ — Before E-machines™ attempted to put together its first garbage PC Compaq™ was turning out inferior products by the ton. Now setting its sights on low cost hungry MIS departments they are trying to produce work stations and servers. More of glorified graphing calculators than workstations; the machines are definitely not meant for high end 3D work and more for office program users. Compaq™ is notorious for using HSP modems, which are the absolute worst modems on the market (HSPs are software modems and therefore suck). Compaq’s™ servers aren’t much better and offer extra features such as hardware failures, slow access rates, and poor uptime.

Best Processor Manufacturer: AMD™ — AMD™ a year ago had a horrible reputation. No one would buy their product. With the release of the Atholon™ processor that totally changed. The Atholon™ processor is ground breaking. While Intel’s™ Coppermine Core Pentium III™ is faster it was because of AMD™ that Intel™ had to up the bar for performance. The Atholon™ as a chip is more then good enough for gaming and normal number crunching. Some reports have complained about its server capabilities, but that isn’t the market AMD™ is after. The market, home users, will find the Atholon™ an exceptional value with excellent features.

Best Sound Card Manufacturer/Chipset: Creative Labs ™ — With the creation of Sound Blaster Live!™ 3D audio positioning took a step forward. The Sound Blaster MP3+™ and Gamer+™ both use Creative Labs’™ proprietary sound fonts technology via its EMU10K1 processor to provide realistic reverb and positioning. Aureal A3D™, their competitor, is good, but sound fonts for gaming especially shows superior realism and the MP3+™ comes with the most complete MP3 software package of any sound card. That is what puts this pick over the top for us.

Best Graphics Card Manufacturer/Chipset: nVidia™ — nVidia™ created the TNT™ Chipset and completely changed the graphics card market forever. Removing 3DFX Voodoo™ from the top spot in under a year nVidia™ then released TNT2™ finally putting Direct3D/Open GL graphics engines on the gaming map. When GeForce 256™ was released it utterly decimated the competition. Using a GNU (graphic processor) instead of the computer CPU to render graphics GeForce™ can render more triangles, pixels, and rotations per second then any other card/chipset. GeForce 256™ literally blows other chipsets away performance wise and is worth the high price for its surperior performance.

Best Modem/Communication Manufacturer: US Robotics ™ — 3Com™ used to own US Robotics™ and therefore had the best modems available for V.90/X2™. Plus X2™ is much more stable then V.90. Throughput rates are excellent and so is the error control/checking. However, when 3Com™ decided to unload US Robotics™ earlier this year every PC user shuddered. Will US Robotics™ maintain its hold on the modem market? We’ll see.

Best Hard Drive Manufacturer: Maxtor™ — Maxtor’s™ Ultra ATA hard drives are fast. Running at 7,200 RPMs with sub-9ms seek times the DiamondMax™ Series is an excellent storage choice. If bigger is better you can’t get much bigger then a 30GB hard drive. Maxtor™ hard drives have excellent reliability and a good warranty. All in all it DiamondMax™ is a great buy.

Coolest Innovation: Intellimouse™ — Microsoft™ really came through with its Intellimouse Explorer™ that uses a digital laser to track the mouse movements instead of a ball like a conventional mouse. It is very accurate and great for art, 3D, CAD, etc… Very cool idea that works well in both concept and design.

Stupidest Innovation: Diamond™ — When Diamond™ decided it didn’t want to be its own company and was bought out by S3™ no one thought there would be a problem. Then S3™ decided it would produce no new products without its proprietary chipsets. That wasn’t so bad. S3 Savage™ is an okay chipset, but the problem was then they pulled all driver support on their legacy products. Well, consumers started complaining and as cited in MaximumPC™ Diamond™ will once again start making drivers for its legacy TNT2/TNT™ and A3D™ chipset products. Too late though since consumers have already moved onto better products produced by Diamonds’™ competitors.

Best Office Software Package: Star Office ™ — Sun™ did a good thing when they released their Star Office™ for free. For the first time a powerful and complete work solution package was available for under $10 on a CD. Star Office™ has an excellent word processor, spread sheet, web page authoring tool, web browser, and desktop interface. Highly recommended for business/home users who just can’t afford over priced software.

Best Graphics & Art Creation/Manipulation Software: Photoshop 5 ™ — Adobe Photoshop 5™ is a powerful solution to create graphics for the Internet or publishing. The graphics are rendered and outputted smoothly. The filters are powerful and easily expanded with cool effects plug-in packages that install easily. With a good mouse, steady hand, and some patience you can really output some great art. As always the product is great for photo manipulation. All the graphics on this site incidentally were created in Photoshop 5™.

Best Web Creation Software: Dreamweaver 2 ™ — Macromedia Dreamweaver™ has always been my WYSIWYG web creation tool of choice. It is easily expandable through other products (Flash™, Director™, or other Macromedia™ Products) and also thanks to its scripting features. This web page is made in Dreamweaver™ and everytime we go back to redesign we find something new in the product that we like, it grows with you as you learn to be a better web page designer.

Best Sound Editing/Tracking Software: Acid Pro 2™ — Back in the days of early sound production if you wanted quality sound editing you’d have to pay thousands. Forget that now. With Acid Pro™ you can have a multi-tracking and sound editing (via Sound Forge XP 2™ included in the package) to create music. Acid™ has multiple outputs, effects, and can basically do everything you want with your music. Got to love it… and yes all of DigitalFl00d’s music is done in its lower price ($99) little brother Acid Music™ and that too is a great value.

Best Internet Software: Internet Explorer 5™ — Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.02™ is stable and renders quickly. Its support for HTML 4 and DHTML is excellent. It renders what you tell it to in your design. It has Java, VBscript, and Active X (that may be its only downfall). Unfortunately early versions of Internet Explorer 5.5™ don’t look stable, but our hopes are the next version will be as good as the current one once the Beta version is finalized.

Best Software Innovation: Direct X 7™ — Microsoft™ decided to support hardware acceleration about two years ago with Direct X™. At first people laughed, but now they are choking on it. Direct X™ allows video devices (OpenGL and TNT™) or sound devices (A3D or Sound Fonts) to write from the hardware and control output. What that means is better graphics and sound if you have good hardware. Also this allows programmers to author software that can be generically dropped into a program via Direct X plug-ins™. The world will never be the same.

Worst Software Innovation: Host Signal Processing/Software Emulation Hardware — When Rockwell/Conexant™, PCTel™, Lucent™, Ambient/Cirrus™, and Telepath™ decided that software emulation would be a great way to cut costs they weren’t wrong. By taking a modem (traditionally made up of tons of chips, ROM, RAM, and resistors) and replacing those parts with software that would “pretend” to be hardware they did cut costs. In fact by simply making a modem with a circuit that transferred analog data to a digital PCI port you can then use software to interpret that data. The idea looked great on the drawing board. That was four years ago. Since then a ton of modem makers are relying on the aforementioned chip makers to provide them with PCI controllerless cards that dare sport the word 56K modem. The software is buggy, unreliable, and takes up to three times the resources of conventional hardware modem. To make things worse the completely unreliable V.90 standard doesn’t have good error control to begin with. With the majority of users residing in rural/suburban communities there is no reliable since current phone line standards aren’t high enough to allow anyone can get a true 56K connection. The most common connect speed is 24K and the throughput is usually even lower. To make the situation worse now major vendors such as Compaq™, Gateway™, and even at one point Dell™ have cut costs by using cheap modems then blaming the Internet Service Providers for their defective software modems. So what can you do? Well, software modems are useful for something… they make great coasters!

Worst Software: AOL 5™/Netzip™ — Microsoft™ gets slammed for writing software that takes over your PC, but forget about Internet Explorer™ or antitrust. America Online released version 5 of its Internet access software knowing that once you said “yes” to the install it would render all other browsers and connections to the Internet useless. A lawsuit has since ensued, but no claims or even apologizes have come out officially from AOL™. Right up there with that fiasco is Netzip™ whose product also once installed will deny web pages and file transfers by placing garbage key values in your registry. Both companies deserve to have a nice big steaming bag of shit sent to them for there service contributions to crappy products.