New Year, New PCs?

Technologies that make it easier to handle music, video, games and other multimedia are also on tap for 2005.
PC vendors will release more PCs with Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 operating system, designed to make it easy to burn DVDs and manage digital media files, as well as pause and record live television.
To help users handle their expanding collections of music and movie files, PC vendors will also increase the storage capacity of hard drives in mainstream PCs. Today they are typically between 80GB and 120GB. In 2005, expect to see $800 PCs with around 200GB of storage, Baker said.
A disk technology called Serial ATA is also becoming established. It includes a feature called Native Command Queuing, which allows a drive to manage multiple commands from the PC in whatever order it deems most efficient, rather than the order in which they were received. It can deliver a substantial performance boost to users, and that's good news for data-heavy applications such as those involving video.
In the optical disc space, users are likely to see incremental increases in DVD read and write speeds. In the latter half of the year the first PC drives supporting new, blue-laser based disc formats, Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD, are expected to make their way onto the market. Both formats are aimed primarily at high-definition video and can store several times more data than today's DVDs. Single-layer Blu-ray Discs can store around 25GB, while HD-DVD isn't far behind. Hewlett-Packard recently became the first to go on record with its plans for shipping Blu-ray Disc PCs, saying it will offer them in 2005.
However, the move towards PCs with better multimedia features will only work if they provide a simple, rewarding experience for users, noted IDC's Kay.
PCs captured the hearts and wallets of buyers by making tasks such as word processing much easier. Televisions and DVD players are also easy to use. People won't want a PC in their living room if it doesn't provide them with a good experience for their money, Kay said.