Have you ever seen a television show and thought, “How can I see another 36 hours of that?” If you’re as obsessed with media as I am, you probably view entertainment in seasons, not episodes.

When attempting to cook up your TV junkie fix, you may find that supporting your habit means blowing all of your money on DVD box sets and frivolous premium channel subscriptions. With reruns as your only methadone source, how do you handle an unhealthy media obsession?

One-size-fits-all has never been a good thing, until now. Apple’s newest innovation, the Mac Mini, is a hardware system that takes small to a highest level. Inside its petite 2-inch tall, 6.5-inch wide frame lies the world’s most advanced operating system, Mac OS X, allowing you to run modern and innovative software quickly. Don’t be fooled by its stylish appearance either.

Affordable and portable, this system makes burning your own DVD or organizing pictures completely painless. It’s all made possible by iLife, a suite of easy to applications that allows you to create your own music, publish pod casts, and produce movies starring yours truly. Front Row allows you to enjoy media technology like never before. View and preview music, organize your vacation pictures into a slideshow, or simply watch your favorite DVD.

HP Pavilion zd8230us 17″ Notebook PC (Intel Pentium 4 Processor 650 (H-T), 1024 MB RAM, 100 GB Hard Drive, LightScribe DVD+/-RW and CD-RW Combo Drive)

Keeping up with the times is important. Once you go mobile with a PC, it is extremely difficult to be tied down to a desktop. The trade off is that you give up upgradeability for mobility. Out of the box, this machine is good enough for most games, all office products, most A/V software, and still has enough processing power to handle more.

Monitor
It has a very clear 17″ LCD monitor that puts every other laptop to shame. The screen real estate allows for easy switching between numerous applications if necessary. It also makes for a fantastic DVD experience. There are no cons to the monitor.

Speakers
The native speakers are acceptable. This is a laptop, so high fidelity sound isn’t going to be a purchasing point, but these work at least as well as speakers typical for desktops.

Midtown Madness (Jewel Case)

In Microsoft’s Midtown Madness, the city of Chicago is your playing ground. There is traffic, street lights, stop signs, police, pedestrians and they all abide by the laws. When you race you will either race against contenders or against time and all other traffic still abides by laws so be prepared to whip in and out of those law abiding citizens and take any short cuts you can find. To start out you can pick any of the five unlocked cars. The other five are locked and you will have to prove your stuff to unlock them.