A new breed of entertainment laptops incorporates
all the components of a home theater–a PVR,
a TV, a CD and DVD player, a radio, a wide-screen LCD, and remote controls–into
stylish cases that will fit right in with your living room, your kitchen, or
your bathroom. While these multimedia powerhouses
are too heavy for extensive travel, they’re definitely lightweight enough to
move from room to room. A handful of these laptops can play CDs and DVDs
without booting up the Windows operating system,
making for an even better home-theater experience.
On top of all that, many are high-performance PCs in their own right, giving
you all the tools you need for home productivity tasks, digital photography,
and gaming. The brand-new Dell Inspiron 9200 offers a particularly impressive
set of features, including a 17-inch wide-screen display, in a relatively featherweight,
7.7-pound package. The HP Pavilion zd8000
is one of the most powerful entertainment
notebooks we’ve seen, featuring a 17-inch wide-screen display, a top-shelf ATI
graphics card, and an external TV tuner with two sets of inputs. And the ABS
Mayhem G3 handles gaming and video with
aplomb, for a competitive price.