Pros: Very quiet, reads Blurays, is backwards-compatible with DVD, and installs easily.

Cons: It's not a Bluray burner. Of course, it never claimed to be!

Overall Review: Those worried about the included PowerDVD OEM only giving two channel audio needn't worry if their system is feeding their audio reciever via SPDIF. You'll get full surround sound out of a HTPC if you're hooked up this way. Just make sure to enter PowerDVD's configuration panel and tell it what you've got--you'll be alright without buying the full version.

Pros: Securely holds two 2.5" hard drives in a single 3.5" bay. This is great for those who are upgrading to SSD, and don't want to fumble with flimsy adapters. These brackets come with screws, but work well in a tool-less case by essentially mimicking the profile of a standard hard drive. Because each drive snaps into place and the adapter has a release for each bay, swapping out drives is a cinch.

Cons: You'll have to stagger your drives (one upside down, one rightside up) in order to plug your power cables into your drives' sockets. I wish ICY DOCK spaced the bays out more.

Overall Review: There's better solutions out there, but this is far from the worst. Even though you'll have fun plugging your drives in, unless you burn through drives like crazy you're not going to have to do it often. Which for you IT guys means that it's not the best choice for troubleshooting hard drive issues or testing stability of drives that won't be in these adapters for the long haul.

Pros: Clean appearance, tasteful design. I didn't wait long to get them; even though I ordered from a different vendor, these were shipped from Newegg, who did their usual fine job in getting the product on my doorstep quickly.

Cons: Just because they look nice and got here quickly doesn't make them good discs. Using a Lite-On burner with current firmware, I have a 100% fail rate with these. Now, lest you think I'm doing something wrong, I've had great success burning other brands. I've even had good luck with the 4X Memorex discs. But these 6X discs... stink. At 4X, at 6X--doesn't matter. Reading errors on verification If--IF--they complete the burn using ImgBurn. Disc after disc. In fact, I see ImgBurn's reporting another bad burn as I type this. That's eight out of eight. I've got 22 more to go, but I'm thinking that it's time to use them for target practice.

Overall Review: 100% fail rate so far, kids. Let that sink in a moment before clicking "add to cart." I've written off my expense as tuition--the price I paid to learn never to order these again. Please don't pay tuition to learn the same lesson as me when I just gave you an education for free.

Pros: 2TBs of meaty storage space on a single drive, with decent speed.

Cons: Remember how much you drooled over the thought of owning a 200GB hard drive a few years back? In a few years, this will look like that 200GB hard drive does now. But right now that's not really a con, is it?

Overall Review: Windows 7 choked on recognizing it until I used Ultimate Boot Disk to create a primary partition. After that, no problems whatsoever. (I think this may have confused some reviewers who concluded that their drive had arrived dead.) Once Windows sees it... well... it's big. It's storage. And while it's not the fastest drive in the world, it's no slouch, either. Since it's going in a HTPC, I'm sure I'll need another soon enough--but I won't hesitate in choosing this particular drive.

Pros: The D2Audio chip simply has to be heard to be believed. Because of it, I've put my old receiver in storage and haven't so much as dusted it off since. It's that good. It's also a breeze to set up, since it uses Windows' audio drivers in Windows 7 and Vista. Integrated graphics remove the need for purchasing a video card.

Cons: My board came with foam padding on the inside of the backplate that needed to be removed in order to fit the board into my HTPC case. My board also shipped with the first version of BIOS, which had some limitations on CPU recognition. The amp card bracket on my board is also too high: I made washers out of pieces of the mentioned foam padding to give the screw something to tighten against. All of these problems, to my understanding, have been corrected in later shipments--but understand that you may run into them. Also, no Windows XP support... so if you have an old copy of Windows MCE laying around, you might not be able to use it without jumping through a lot of hoops.

Overall Review: I'm trying not to grade the board down on problems that are software-related, since I'm using Windows 7 RC. Rather, I'm reviewing the concept, and how well it's been implemented. For audio, I'd give it ten eggs if I were able to. For video, I've found Blu-ray playback to be problematic--but, again, software related (and you'll likely want to look at a Quad Core instead of the 5050e Dual Core I'm using for the faster Hypertransport speeds). DVD plays flawlessly.

Pros: Newegg got it to me with their usual snappy speed.

Cons: I couldn't RMA it back to them fast enough.

Overall Review: Where I work, we use Asus motherboards to test computer memory--and we're always having trouble with them. I decided to bite the bullet and buy an Asus video card, since it had exactly the specs I was looking for to upgrade an aging motherboard. Well, it's an Asus! The drivers installed fine... but afterwards, Windows would boot up into a black screen. I had to start Windows in Safe Mode to uninstall the drivers. I tried the ATI drivers from their website... and during installation was told that no matching hardware could be found (and yes, I had the right drivers according to ATI's website). So I went to Asus' website and downloaded their most recent drivers. Installation went fine... and I got that lovely black screen again once I rebooted. My next step was trying different plugs on my power supply. No dice. Now it's back in the mail, and I'm eating the shipping cost: I think of it as tuition. As far as I can tell, the Asus "lifestyle" is spending your day fixing your computer.