Gateway Gateway 600XL 2.4GHz Pentium 4-M Removable DVD-ROM 8x Removable CD-RW 24x- Free Shipping and Handling (Gateway-600XL)

WHAT'S HOT: You can live large with the 600XL's towering 15.7-inch screen, extra-spacious keyboard, and two modular bays. Depending on your needs, the bays make it possible to carry a total of three hard drives, two batteries, or two optical drives. (One optical drive--a combination drive at this price--and a floppy drive come standard.) The 600XL does well on one battery pack alone; it ran for 3 hours in our tests before needing a recharge.

WHAT'S NOT: A gray yacht of a notebook, the Gateway 600XL measures almost 14 inches wide by 12 inches deep by 2 inches thick, and weighs almost 10 pounds including its 1-pound power adapter. To swap bay devices you must turn the notebook off and wrestle with dual release buttons. There is no button to turn wireless scanning on and off.

WHAT ELSE: In the performance department, the 600XL's PC WorldBench 4 score of 107 is slightly ahead of the average score of the other 2.4-GHz Pentium 4 notebooks we've tested--and only 1 point behind that of the fastest model.

The well-equipped 600XL comes with a full complement of notebook connections, including a parallel port, a FireWire port, a TV-out port, and even an S/PDIF digital audio jack. Four programmable quick-launch buttons grace the 600XL's oversize keyboard, which offers an unusually deep wrist rest, a separate button for scrolling documents, and quiet typing action. Ironically, though, the square mouse buttons are so small that our thumbs sometimes missed them. An unobtrusive row of small, plain buttons on the front plays music CDs. The sound isn't bad for a notebook, but the speakers are in the wrist rest, where your wrists can muffle them when you're typing. On the bright side, Gateway has ditched the awful Audio DJ DOS application previously required to play CDs and now has the system default to Windows Media Player.

Taking the opposite tack from most vendors these days, Gateway provides documentation primarily in printed form. The attractive user manual goes beyond documenting the notebook to explaining networks and how to use the Internet, among other computer topics. On the hard drive you get Gateway's HelpSpot, but this offers mostly generic hardware and Windows information (though it does include some entertaining introductory videos).

UPSHOT: Two modular bays make the Gateway 600XL one of the most configurable desktop replacements you can buy; it's especially valuable for anyone who needs a lot of internal storage. With the big screen, good keyboard, full assortment of connections, and generous graphics memory, it all adds up to one of the better workstations for multimedia editors.