Shuttle M2000 Viiv Media Center PC

Sleek design; copious A/V connectivity; removable drive bay.

Not enough RAM; idling performance; smallish hard drive; lack of expansion options.

The Shuttle M2000 is a great-looking living-room system that handles media tasks easily, but its stripped-down specs keep it from doing double duty as your main PC.

The Media Center layer lets you access your stored music, pictures and video in an easy couch potato fashion. A larger hard drive would be nice for more DVR and music storage (250GB won't get you a lot of high definition video). An HD DVD or Blu-ray...