Barely Portable Powerhouses

We tested three luxury liners among Media Center laptops: Dell's Inspiron XPS Gen 2, HP's Pavilion Zd8000, and Toshiba's Qosmio G25-AV513. Each has a 17-inch wide-screen display, is about 2 inches thick, and weighs 11 pounds or more when you factor in traveling accessories such as the power brick (the Qosmio's weighs nearly 1.5 pounds).

But they certainly do pile on the extras. Each one has a fast processor, a high-end graphics card, a DVD burner, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a television tuner, and ports all over the place. The Dell came in at $3736; the HP, $2217; and the Toshiba, $2999. All three are impressive entertainment systems, though they're hardly identical.

Read more on "Heavy-Duty Entertainment."

Alan Stafford