Worst Complete Home PC Manufacturer: Tiger Direct Systems — Can you say “garbage”? I knew you could. It’s funny that garbage and Tiger aren’t closer in the dictionary. They sure mean the same thing. Every Tiger Direct System comes with 16-bit wave table sound. That’s sort of like a pretend sound card. Worse yet, you get a whopping 4MB of video RAM. Nice. If you figure out which modem you have in the PC you’re luckier than most people. You’d have better luck buying a box and painting the word computer on it.

Best Commercial/Workstation Complete PC/Server Manufacturer: Dell — Yes, two years running my nonlinear DV editing system/AV nonlinear system of choice is a Dell. Why? High end video card meets high end sound card meets lots of good stuff. Every component for every price range is suited for its role. From simple office applications to high end work stations you can’t beat the price or the components.

Worst Commercial/Work Complete PC/Server Manufacturer: Compaq — Two years running Compaq has snagged this award. Why? Simply put, I have never seen a company pride itself on unreliable components. Yes, their bottom end machines come with PC Tel HSP modems. Yes, they are the worst modems on the market. Yes, the video RAM is completely shared and lacks the power for any 3D application out there. It’s kind of sad. Compaq recently put together a real good PC (Presario 5900Z), but for most consumers it’s too late. They have already found aforementioned greener pastures to buy in.

Best Processor Manufacturer: AMD (Thunderbird Athlon) — I know the Intel Pentium 4 is the fastest processor on the market, but can you get one? Maybe. Besides with twenty-some-odd step caching you really don’t see any true application performance beyond what you would expect. So that is why I chose the AMD Thunderbird as the better CPU. It offers real world performance, as well as, gaming performance that can’t be beat. What can I say? I’m biased.

Best Sound Card Manufacturer/Chipset: Creative Labs (Live 5.1! Platinum) — Creative Labs (mostly through buy outs) has conquered the sound card market. With the advent of their Live! 5.1 sound cards this year Creative has put itself in an excellent position to conquer not just gaming, but also DVD playback. This certainly would only further their excellent chip set and sound creation capabilities as they continue to expand their markets. One question: Where’s my professional musician workstation sound card? You guys need to go there!

Best Graphics Card Manufacturer/Chipset: ATI (Radeon) — If you told me a year ago I would name ATI as the best video card maker I would have laughed at you. A year ago they sucked bad. Their cards were archiac pieces of silicon. However, with the Radeon we finally saw a real video card that could not only touch, but possibly burn the mighty nVidia GeForce 2 Ultra chip set. The Radeon rules when it comes to large polygon fills. It has a wonderful graphics rendering engine and offers the very fast DDR SDRAM for memory (64MB of it!). Smoking.

Best Modem/Communication Manufacturer: US Robotics (Performance Pro Internal PCI) — We are about a half year into US Robotics being a self owned entity again. So far, so good. They have recently started production of a V.92 standard modem. We’ll see how that goes. For now though, the US Robotics Performance Pro owns the roost. It is hardware controlled and therefore very fast. Unless your line levels are horrid (read: sounds like underwater) you should be able to get a connection to your ISP.

Best Hard Drive Manufacturer/Series: IBM (Deskstar 75GXP) — With 75GB of storage space and one of the fatest access times around you can’t go wrong with a Deskstar. The spindle runs at 7,500RPM and works wonders in RAID 0 (striped=speed) configurations. You simply can’t get a faster large drive, but it will cost you a good penny. Performance like this isn’t cheap.

Coolest Innovation: TDK BURN-Proof — The VeloCD would be a cool CD-RW burner on its own. Couple the technology called BURN-Proof (it elminates something called buffer underrun errors that occur when you multi-task) and now you have a super kick ass CD-RW. BURN-Proof has had few competitors (Sanyo makes something similar), but TDK gets props for being the first. Thanks to BURN-Proof you can burn MP3s while playing Quake III. Thank you TDK!

Stupidest Innovation: The AMR Standard — I can picture it now: A bunch employees of a computer technology development company are standing around and one of the software programmers says, “Gee, I wonder if we can make software modems perform worse and cost less?”. The engineer to his left says, “Yeah! We could not only emulate all the modem functions in software to drag down system resources, but we could also halve the pin bandwidth and use an on board sound card to interpret the data!” The marketing guy says, “Sounds ineffective, cheap, and prone to errors. I’ll get right on the ad copy!”. Yes, AMR (stands for Audio Modem Riser) is a daughter board that hooks up to your motherboard in a small PCI-like slot. The slot has a DSP (digital signal processor) which interprets the modem’s data. It actually is a glorified sound card and it isn’t really that great of a sound card (think 16-bit sound “yuck”). Recently the AMR Standards Commission unveiled its next generation standard ACR (Audio Communications Riser) and it’s just repackaged crap. You’re be better off screaming out your window to your ISP.

Best Office Software Package: Microsoft Office 2000 — I hate to have to admit it, but Microsoft Office 2000 with all the Service Packs is great. I’ve seen business of all sizes use the various programs to stay in constant contact with to-do lists, task management, internal e-mail, and document sharing that significantly improves productivity. I held off at first last year and chose Sun Star Office 5.1 over the initial Office 2000 release due to bug concerns, but with the latest Service Packs the programs seem stable. Coupled with the fact that Star Office has yet to offer comparable features to Office 2000 or a better integrated Windows desktop pushed the nomination away from Sun this year. Let’s hope Sun figures all this out before it’s too late.

Best Graphics & Art Creation/Manipulation Software: Adobe Photoshop 6 — Adobe Photoshop 6 is simply the best version of Photoshop ever. Every feature that you know and love from previous iterations is present. All the excellent plug-in utilities still work wonders on your art pieces. Whether you are an amateur photographer or a professional designer, Photoshop has something to make your pieces ready for the web, printing, color separations, or even to animate short graphics (via Adobe Image Ready). Maximum PC dubbed Photoshop “The Fireworks killer”. I wouldn’t argue with that. It truly is the best at what it does.

Best Web Creation Software: Macromedia Dreamweaver 4 — I started using Dreamweaver two years ago. I fell in love with the simple interface, the vast expandability, and the robust HTML support. Dreamweaver 4 has managed to improve upon perfection somehow. Everything a serious web developer needs is available upfront. Sure, raw HTML coding may be “smoother”, but if you need to revamp an entire web site and only have under an hour to do so you quickly would see why WYSIWYG and site wide management is needed. Plus you don’t get all the extra garbage code you find in other WYSIWYG editors. I can’t rave enough about Dreamweaver so I’ll shut up while I’m ahead.

Best Sound Editing/Tracking Software: Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 5 — When you take an already powerful sound editor and incorporate both audio, as well as, video multi-tracking into a product. Then you put into that great product features for future codecs. You have probably have the most powerful sound editor out right now. That is exactly what Sound Forge 5 brings to the table. If you need to manipulate sound or record professionally look no further. I’m literally blown away by all the features available. Putting it into a musician’s perspective: It’s the equivalent of finding that perfect guitar that you can’t help, but play all day.

Best Internet Software: Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 SP1 — With the advent of Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 the browser finally gets stable and out renders Netscape 6, as well as, its predecessor Netscape Communicator 4.76. The browser wars are over and Internet Explorer has clearly won. Not that everyone is happy about that.

Best Software Innovation: Linux Kernel 2.4.2 — Linux is not only free, but it works (a novel idea). It networks easily. It is secure. It is resource friendly. What else do you want? Well, what ever you want the new Linux Kernel 2.42 has it. Boosting support for upcoming technologies and keeping Linux competitive with Microsoft’s OSs was the main reason for the new kernel. However, Linus Torvalds (the inventor and ring master of Linux) stresses this was not simply a catch up effort. Linux has placed itself in the forefront with a kernel capable of handling high end applications and evolving PC platforms. With several improvements and bug fixes; the new Linux Kernel stands as a strong heart to a robust body. The update was a long time a coming, but obviously worth the wait. Microsoft watch out– Linux is back and better than ever.

Worst Software Innovation: Microsoft Windows Media Player 7 — When Microsoft sought to conquer the broadband media market they tried to go big. An application that could play MP3s and streaming video. An application that could integrate with your OS. An application that could crash randomly and lock up your system for no reason. Well, maybe the latter wasn’t the original intention, but that is exactly what happens. The Media Player manages to hog resources like no other program. It takes forever to load. Unless your PC is high end you can forget about it. Sure, the Windows Media Format is smaller than MP3, but who cares? Who wants to save 10Kb per minute? It doesn’t matter! It’s just another attempt for Microsoft to conquer the market. This time they failed miserably. Microsoft: Stick to flaky OSs and leave flaky media players to the pros.

Worst Software: Microsoft Windows Me! — Windows 98 Second Edition worked. That obviously was a bad thing since with Windows Me! (Me! being short for Millennium) they managed to break everything again. Sure, dial-up networking is now in the control panel. So is the “secret” task bar options. Big freaking deal! The rest of the OS doesn’t work! Everything you install crashes. No drivers from Windows 98 work in Windows Me! And don’t even get me started on the networking issues. Everything you knew and loved about Windows has been changed for no reason what so ever. I’d ask why one more time, but I’m probably wasting my breath. For a simple “upgrade” from Windows 98 it sure changes everything. In the end, that is definitely a bad thing.