The Best, the Worst, and the Ugliest: 2005

It's Not MCE If It Ain't Got TV

Sin of omission of the year: Microsoft finally got serious about putting its most up-to-date, most attractive version of Windows -- Win XP Media Center Edition (MCE) -- on almost all consumer PCs.

Unfortunately, price-conscious PC makers shipped most of said systems without the TV tuner and TiVo-style viewing options that best illustrate the Media Center experience. Next week we'll see if Intel's Viiv platform -- a hardware-bundle brand that hopes to define home PCs as the Centrino campaign has defined notebooks -- proves more satisfying.

Oddest omission of the year: Apple launched its latest iMacs with an iPod-lookalike remote control and big-icon interface called Front Row for enjoying digital music, photos, home videos, and DVDs ... and no TV tuner or time-shifting software for personal video recording. Was Steve Jobs preparing to body-slam Win XP MCE but persuaded to hold back?

Software of the year: The improved version 2.0 of the open-source OpenOffice.org suite. It may be a bit sluggish, but it stands toe to toe with Microsoft Office 2003; moving to its industry-standard file format may be a minor chore, but no more so than the changed-yet-again format of Microsoft's forthcoming Office 12; its purchase price is $0. Runners-up: ZoneLabs' ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite 6.0 and the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail client.

Still not software of the year: 2005 brought some tasty new flavors and capable Windows alternatives such as Ubuntu and OpenSUSE, but we've been making a pitch for desktop Linux almost every year in this space and it just doesn't seem to be gaining traction outside the geek elite. The arrival of the Mac OS on Intel/AMD could put Linux's light under a very large bushel.

Product of the year runners-up: Sony showed again how, if only it would cut its prices by $500, it'd rule the PC market -- the Vaio T350P and its even neater TX670P successor led the way in both lightweight notebook design and wireless-data-network access, while the Vaio VA10G sent other all-in-one Media Center designers back to the drawing board. Sharp became a first-tier laptop contender with the slimline WideNote M4000.

Microsoft's Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 gave the company's famous split-keyboard design a marvelous makeover. Wireless rear speakers made Logitech's Z-5450 the friendliest 5.1 surround-sound system yet. Konica Minolta's Magicolor 2430DL and HP's Color LaserJet 2600N shone bright in a galaxy of bargain-priced, compact color laser printers. Yet none of these compare with the ...

Products of the year: Intel beat AMD to market by a few days, but both of the CPU champs revolutionized desktop computing with dual-core processors. We're still pretty much waiting for optimized, multithreaded software, but the Pentium D and Athlon 64 X2 (and dual-core Opteron, Xeon, and Extreme Edition chips) have already brought more real-world benefit than the ballyhooed move from 32- to 64-bit processing.

Dual-core's seamlessly smooth multitasking is 2005's greatest advance: Once users discover they can at last, really, truly burn a DVD or run a virus check in the background without strangling their applications or games in the foreground, they say goodbye to single-core systems forever. Even HardwareCentral's caught the multitasking fever: We simultaneously wish you a safe, a successful, and a happy New Year, and thanks for reading.

Eric Grevstad is Hardware Central's managing editor. A former editor in chief of Home Office Computing and editor of Computer Shopper, he's been covering PCs and peripherals since leaving the liberal arts for TRS-80 and Apple II magazines in the early '80s.

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