1. Windows Media Center Notebooks With HD-DVD Players

Yes, they're big, but they also pack a powerful high-resolution video punch!

Ever since Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition hit the streets in 2003, the Media Center PC category continues to grow like gangbusters. Apparently, consumers remain hungry for living or family room systems that allow them to organize and enjoy their music, movies, TV programs and other media. In addition to a new crop of ultra-small dual-core PCs built around notebook components, new and interesting offerings keep popping up in what can only be called the "jumbo-screen" or "multimedia-luggable" notebook categories as well.

We originally decided to review the Toshiba Qosmio G35-AV650 by itself, mainly to take a look at its HD-DVD player and what it might mean to movie buffs. To that end, we acquired this system from Toshiba for review in September. But when HP approached us in early October and let us know their brand-new DV9000 series notebook would also offer an optional Toshiba HD-DVD player, we decided to take a look at both systems. We wanted to see how they fared with this new high resolution DVD format, and to get a feel for how much perceptible difference the higher resolution might make to those looking for more from their motion picture playback experience.

As it turned out, it's a good thing we included the HP unit along with the Toshiba in our testing and comparison. Otherwise, we might have come away from our initial exposure with an inaccurate (and less-than-favorable) impression of this new DVD format's playback potential. Though we certainly can't claim to offer an exhaustive overview of all the HD-DVD notebooks available, we did learn a few things, and hope you can benefit from our experience as much as we did.

Our primary objective in conducting this dual review was to get a sense of what difference the HD-DVD unit makes for movie playback, and what kinds of special considerations might be involved in making the most of this hardware. As with this summer's roundup of big-screen MCE notebooks, we conducted our standard battery of notebook benchmarks, along with the Intel Digital Home Capabilities Assessment Tool (DHCAT). Of course, we also include information based on our experience in working with the HD-DVD players in these two units for playback on their built-in displays, as well as on a couple of different HDTV displays (only one of which could handle 1080 resolution, either interleaved or progressive scan).

Join our discussion on this topic