Review: New Media Center Notebooks Up The Ante

The latest Media Center notebooks can more than hold their own against comparably configured desktops, while possessing sleeker designs and the promise of portability.

The notebooks considered for this roundup review integrate a wealth of integrated options and peripherals such as speakers, cameras and widescreens with integrated Dolby speakers. They also pack fatter hard drives with plenty of storage and higher frequency RAM. Overall, these notebooks offer the best of both the personal and professional worlds: They are optimized for playback of digital media and the presentation of rich business applications, making them a good choice for the home, dormitory or traveling business executive.

Digital Connect Lab engineers evaluated a handful of systems from top-tier players: the Toshiba America Qosmio G35-AV600, the Acer TravelMate8200, the Sony VAIO SZ160PC and the Hewlett-Packard Pavilion dv8000t.

Toshiba Qosmio G35-AV600
Engineers began this review with the Qosmio because the design, feature set and bundled technology of past products have set the standard for multimedia notebook computers. More often than not, Toshiba has raised the bar and pushed the notebook design envelope, leaving other vendors to play catch-up.

The G35-AV600 (priced at $2,399) is a remarkable unit, although the offerings from the other vendors considered here are not too far behind. That might be one reason Toshiba considerably reduced the Qosmio's price compared with previous offerings.

The Qosmio offers the ultimate in entertainment-oriented features. The review unit was powered by Intel Centrino Duo Mobile Technology featuring an Intel Core Duo Processor with a speed of up to 1.83GHz. The memory consisted of 1,024 Mbytes of DDR2 SDRAM and included two 80-Gbyte SATA hard-disk drives.

The Qosmio incorporates one of the best 17-inch widescreens CRN engineers have seen, providing native resolution of 1,440 x 900. NVIDIA's GeForce 7300 provides 256 Mbytes of video memory and supports today's most advanced 3-D applications, including Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 and true high dynamic-range (HDR) lighting. NVIDIA PureVideo technology offers high-definition video and superb picture clarity with minimal CPU usage. The G35-AV600 delivers a rich sound from the stock stereo and multichannel audio Dolby Home Theater speakers. One thing that stood out was the amplification from the Harman/ Kardon bass reflex technology. The overall build of the Qosmio is solid and will look good wherever it travels.

As for connectivity, the unit supports all 802.11x options, as well as Bluetooth. Those connectivity options give integrators the opportunity to set up a variety of different devices.

CRN engineers would like to see Windows XP Pro on the Qosmio rather than Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE). As odd as that may sound for such a strong multimedia device, the MCE software is not up to par quite yet. Digital integrators we've spoken with say they struggle continuously with the not-so user-friendly software.

Acer TravelMate 8200
Acer is the only vendor in this review that has decided to exclude Microsoft MCE from its notebook product line. Instead, the TravelMate 8200 considered here ships with Windows XP Pro.

The Travelmate 8200 ($2,299) is a high-end laptop designed with Intel's new Core Duo processor, with the CPUs running at 2GHz compared to the Qosmio's 1.83GHz. It includes an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics card, 120 Gbytes of hard-drive space and ships with 1 Gbyte of DDR2 memory.

As for optical drives, the unit includes a DVD+R Double Layer/DVDRW, which was also found in all units we tested. The built-in Web camera was not included in the other notebooks.