HP's Media-Savvy Dv1000
Portable Pavilion delivers multimedia playback without Windows.
If you love the idea of playing music and DVD movies on your notebook, Hewlett-Packard's Pavilion Dv1000 is the portable you've been waiting for. With this laptop you can bypass booting up Windows and immediately view a DVD movie or enjoy some tunes.
I tested a $1449 preproduction unit and found its 14-inch, 1280-by-768-resolution wide-screen display good, although its reflective coating was a bit distracting (I sometimes had to reposition the display). Its two built-in speakers were adequate, and HP helpfully labels the unit's copious ports and media slots.
Ideal for a working vacation, the notebook weighs just 5.5 pounds (6.4 pounds with its AC adapter), and it lasted a respectable 4 hours in our battery tests. My test unit--which included a 1.5-GHz Pentium M 705 processor, 512MB of RAM, an 80GB hard drive, and 802.11g wireless--offered solid application performance, scoring 64 in our WorldBench 5 tests (comparable to similarly configured notebooks we've reviewed in recent months).
Of course, when your everyday work beckons, you can readily leave the movie enjoyment behind and return to Windows. Simply press the power button twice--once to exit the Quick Play mode, and again to launch Windows.
The biggest downside to the Dv1000: You'll enjoy watching movies on it so much that you might be tempted to forget you have work to do.
Kalpana Ettenson
