3. Introducing Roundup Participants, Continued

Four of these five units include ExpressCard slots - only the Sony lacks one - and all of them include PC Card slots. All include some kind of memory card reader, but surprisingly for multimedia machines, none of those handle the CompactFlash (CF) cards used in most digital cameras. Fortunately PC Card CF adapters are available.

Each includes both wired and wireless networking interfaces. Three machines support Gigabit Ethernet while the other two go up to 100 Mb/s; all support IEEE 802.11b and 802.11g wireless networking, with three adding the seldom-used 802.11a to their bags of tricks. All the units ship with built-in Bluetooth transceivers. Two feature fingerprint security sensors (Sony and Toshiba) and all of them support some kind of multi-channel audio outputs, using an interesting mix of chips from Intel, RealTek and SigmaTel. And of course, all ship with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 installed.

We reviewed the following machines for this roundup, each of which is described in detail in its own section coming right up. (We list these machines alphabetically by vendor, an order that is meant to show no favoritism of any kind.)

Acer Aspire AS9504WSMi Fujitsu LifeBook N6410 HP Pavilion DV8299XX Sony VGN-AX580G Toshiba Qosmio G35-AV600

After working through each of these notebooks, we'll march through our usual benchmark results for the five together. After that, we'll state our conclusions as well as what we learned while putting this roundup together - stay tuned, as we think you'll agree that our observations and findings include a few surprises.