Notebooks

News: A Sony Notebook That Records Video

One of Sony's latest notebooks, the Vaio C1, can also serve as a digital video recorder--letting you record TV shows on its hard drive for playback, say, on your next long flight. (The trendy TiVo device is an example of a stand-alone DVR.) With the included external TV tuner unit and GigaPocket software for TV recording, the Vaio stores TV shows on its 40GB hard drive.

Though GigaPocket has been bundled in Sony Vaio desktops, the Vaio C1 is the first notebook to include the software. The Vaio C1 also features a wide-screen, 8.9-inch TFT LCD with 1280-by-600-pixel native resolution; it is topped by a video camera with 350,000-pixel resolution. And, oh yes, it is also a computer. Currently, the Vaio C1 costs about $1755 in Japan; launch plans outside Asia have not yet been decided, according to Sony. Read more about the Vaio notebook in "Sony Shows off Cool New Vaio Notebooks."

Review: Affordable, Well-Rounded Micron Laptop

The new Micron TransPort XT2 is one of the best-designed, most-affordable one-bay laptops on the market, says PCWorld.com's notebook goddess Carla Thornton. The attractively designed XT2, dolled up with soothing blues and grays, features conveniently located, dedicated music controls for using the notebook as a stand-alone CD player, and the optical drive (a DVD-ROM/CD-RW in the unit we tested) is easily reachable as well.

Unfortunately, the XT2 doesn't include any applications at the $1999 price. It also has a few design problems, such as a cumbersome lid release and battery pull handle. The XT2 configuration Thornton tested--which included a 1-GHz/733-MHz Pentium III-M CPU, 256MB of RAM, 512MB of L2 cache, Windows XP Home, a 14.1-inch active-matrix screen, an Intel 830M graphics board using main memory, and a 20GB hard drive--earned a solid PC WorldBench 4 score of 96.

Tip: Stretch Your Phone Cord's Reach With a Portable Surge Protector

On a recent business trip, I spent several nights at an old college friend's house. After setting up my notebook on a desk in his office, I discovered that neither of the phone cords I had was long enough to reach from my computer on his desk to the RJ-11 wall jack. Fortunately, I had brought along my new portable surge protector from APC.

The APC SurgeArrest Notebook Pro C6 100-240V includes data-line protection for modems and faxes, with jacks for each. As a result, I was able to string one phone cord from my notebook to the surge protector's input phone jack and the other cord from the protector's output phone jack to the wall jack. Voila, I could set the notebook on my friend's desk and still reach the wall jack to make a dial-up Internet connection, with the SurgeArrest acting as a kind of extension for my phone cords. The surge protector costs about $30; read more about it at the APC site.

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