_{Cover of the June 2001 issue of Maximum PC}

Maximum PC (or 'boot' in its earliest days) was my favorite PC magazine. It started life in the late 1990s and continued being published until just a few years ago. It was targeted towards PC enthusiasts. It was sort of like a PC version of the Macintosh dedicated MacAddict. The June 2001 issue includes:

Regulars

In/Out - Letters from readers comparing PCs to cars, GeForce 3 performance results, game requirements, motherboards, and more.

Quick Start - Web controlled appliances, better quality MP3s, faster Duron, Athlon and Pentium 4 CPUs, Windows XP activation feature, Samsung's new 24-inch LCD, a comparison of web based e-mail services, and much more.

Head2Head - A comparison of removeable media including MMC, compact flash, microdrives, SmartMedia, DataFlash, DataPlay, Memory Stick, and PocketZip.

Watchdog - Issues with Razer mice, results of a class action suit against Philips for its CDD2600 CD-R burner, trouble with a DPS Notebook manufactured by GVC, Winfire DSL issues, OnStream goes out of business, some 17-inch LCD monitors from HP may shock you (literally), and more.

_{Table of Contents from the June 2001 issue of Maximum PC}

Reviews

Compaq Presario 7000 - This highly rated machine features a 1.33GHz AMD Athlon CPU 256MB DDR, a 64<B Creative 3D Blaster Annihilator II Ultra DDR video card, a 75GB IBM Deskstar hard drive, both CD-ROM and DVD-R/CD-RW combo drives, and more for just under $3200.
Dell Inspiron i8000 - This highly rated notebook from Dell features an Mobile Pentium III CPU @ 1GHz, 128MB PC100 SDRAM, an nVidia GeForce2 Go video chip with 32MB, an 15-inch UXGA display, and more for a little under $3000.

Winbook X1 - This notebook features a Mobile Pentium III @ 1 GHz, 330MB of PC100 SDRAM, SiS graphics, a 12.2-inch XGA display, and aluminum construction for $3000.

Hercules Game Theater XP - A sound card with a breakout box with all the connections you could ever need.

Visiontek GeForce3 - This video card gets a perfect 10 here. If you were a gamer, this was the card you wanted.

Samsung and HP combo-drives - A comparison of the HP CD-Writer DVD Combo 9900ci ($349) and Samsung RW Combo SM-308 ($199).

Sony Vaio Digital Studio - This PC features a 1.5GHz Pentium 4, 128MB Rambus memory, an AsusTek V7100 video card, 80GB hard drive, and tons of I/O ports for $2199.

Lacie and Buslink mobile hard drives - The Lacie drive features both firewire and USB connections and can be had in 10GB ($329) or 30GB ($699) varieties. The Buslink drive is USB only and there are 20GB ($199) and 60GB ($399) versions to chose from.

_{Table of Contents from the June 2001 issue of Maximum PC (continued)}

Features

Operation Retrofit - A guide to upgrading three older PCs. The first is a custom build PC featuring a 700 MHz Athlon processor which was upgraded by adding an additional 128MB RAM for a total of 256MB and replacing the Voodoo3 3000 video card with an AsusTek V7700 GeForce2 Pro. The second is a Dell Dimension V350 featuring a Pentium II 350 which was upgraded by replacing the CPU with a 500MHz Pentium III and adding an additional 128MB of RAM for a total of 192MB. The third is an HP Pavilion 8260 featuring a Pentium II 266 which was upgraded by upgrading the CPU to a Pentium II 333, adding a Hercules Prophet II MX AGP video card and upgrading the RAM from 32MB to 160MB. These machines also got optical and hard rive upgrades and in some cases cooling improvements.

Size Matters - A look at new big screen displays including those based on classic CRT tech, LCD projection, plasma, rear-projection CRT, and rear-projection DLP.

Gaming Awards - Gaming awards from maximum PC for categories such as weakest Diablo Rip-Off (Diablo II), Best Use of 3D Positional Sound (Thief II), Largest Gaming Environment (Project IGI), Best Set Design (No One Lives Forever), Most Powerful Weapons (The Thunderbolt from Mechwarrior 4), and much more.