2. Introducing The Roundup Participants

Our real goal in conducting this roundup was to get a sense of how well a notebook can deliver a quality multimedia experience both on its own, and as a component in a high-end home theater system. Thus, we not only conducted our standard battery of notebook benchmarks, we also dug into these units' capabilities for delivering an enjoyable multimedia experience with music, TV programming and DVDs.

Before we look at the notebooks that form the primary focus for this roundup, let's introduce our candidates and describe them collectively. To begin with, these notebooks belong to the desktop replacement category primarily because of the size of their displays and their hefty weight. Tellingly, none of these notebooks ships with a carrying case, nor weighs less than 8.57 pounds (3.89 kg). While these devices can indeed be picked up and moved around more easily than a desktop computer, you wouldn't want to lug one of them along on a road trip. Another point is that a notebook with a 17" display is too big for the tray tables in most airline coach seats.

These notebooks include three machines with various models of the Intel Centrino Core Duo processor (T2300, T2400 and T2600) along with two machines using the Pentium M 760. As you'd expect from reading other notebook reviews on MobilityGuru, the machines with the newer Core Duos have a performance edge over those with the older Pentium M processors. All of these units feature at least 1 GB of DDR2 533 MHz RAM however, so memory access differences aren't quite as dramatic. All offer SATA hard disks, and four of them offer two hard disks, where disk capacity ranges from a low of 120 GB (Acer) to a high of 320 GB (Fujitsu). Four of the drives are 5,400 RPM, while one machine has 4,200 RPM drives (Fujitsu).

There's also an interesting mix of graphics processors, including two Nvidia offerings (GeForce Go 7300 and 7400) and three from ATI (two with Mobility Radeon X700s, one with X1400). Four of the units offer 1440x800 resolution, while the fifth offers 1600x1200 (Fujitsu). All include TV tuner cards, but watching TV on the Sony unit is a little different from doing so on the other machines. Three of the machines provide four USB 2.0 ports, one offers only three (Sony), but another offers five (Fujitsu). All include one Firewire port and one VGA port. Only the Acer offers a DVI-D video output, and only two machines (Toshiba and Fujitsu) offer component video outputs.