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Portly Portables

While one category of desktops has shrunk, a class of notebooks has increased in girth. Large, heavy desktop replacements often come equipped with lots of processing power, capacious storage, and monstrous wide-aspect screens. Some seem intended more for use on your desk than on your lap.

We examined HP's Pavilion Zd7000, a huge notebook with a 17-inch wide-screen display that's ideal for watching DVD movies. The Zd7000 runs Windows XP Media Center, the operating system optimized for home multimedia applications like photo slide shows and TV, and we found it ready for most any graphics-intensive task you might throw at it.

Using a 2.8-GHz Pentium 4 desktop processor and 512MB of RAM, the Zd7000 earned a score of 110 on our PC WorldBench 4 tests. Such a mark means the Zd7000 is not nearly as fast as many currently available tower systems; however, the laptop performed in line with similarly configured notebooks (and even most desktops with the same processor).

The Zd7000 weighs 11.1 pounds including its power adapter, so it's not the best system to tote from place to place. However, it would certainly be much more portable than even a small desktop system such as the FragBox--with that unit, you would have to take along all the necessary peripherals, which would add a lot of weight and be clunky to carry.

Behemoth laptops frequently include fast mobile graphics processors, such as the 128MB NVidia GeForce FX Go or the 128MB ATI Mobility Radeon 9700; the Zd7000 uses the former.

With a notebook, don't expect much in the way of upgradability. Most allow you to swap in a new hard drive or add RAM, and many have a PC Card slot for installing extras such as Wi-Fi, but that's it. If tinkering inside a PC is your passion, a notebook might not be your best choice.

The HP Zd7000, configured as we saw it, will set you back $2029, about $500 more than a similarly configured desktop PC would. But if you want the best of both worlds--that is, a powerful processor and a big LCD packed into a portable system--a desktop-replacement notebook could be just the sort of computer that you ought to choose.