HP's Dreamy Media Center
High-end multimedia PC comes with a price to match.
Tricked out with a gorgeous 23-inch high-definition LCD monitor, Hewlett-Packard's Media Center M1050y is a dream system. Unfortunately, the price is a bit of a nightmare: $4900.
But if you have the capital, you'll get a powerful Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004 PC that makes managing your burgeoning digital lifestyle remarkably easy and fun. The F2304 monitor's 1920 by 1200 native resolution offers beautiful video playback, and the Klipsch ProMedia Ultra THX 5.1 speakers produce wonderfully crisp, clear audio.
I also liked the unit's removable Personal Media Drive, which you can take out of the system's chassis to use with any other PC via USB 2.0. Equally convenient is the computer's built-in seven-in-one memory card reader.
The system's black-and-silver tower case looks a little too, well, PC to make a full transfer to most living rooms. But with its 3.6-GHz Pentium 4 processor, 1GB of DDR400 SDRAM memory, and 250GB hard drive, my shipping model proved plenty powerful for most any computing task, scoring 96 on WorldBench 5--on par with comparably configured desktop systems that we have previously tested.
HP has less expensive versions of the M1050y that omit goodies such as the Klipsch speakers ($250) and the LCD monitor ($2200). But if you're looking for a multimedia powerhouse, it would be hard to find one better than this drool-worthy configuration.
Anne B. McDonald
