Toshiba Satellite P25-S670 Notebook

The Satellite comes with everything you need to connect directly to a TV, including a short coaxial cable. For integrating the notebook into an existing cable and VCR setup, you'll need to buy a splitter. You can watch live TV on the 17-inch screen, pausing TiVo-like, or schedule programs to record and watch later. The blue-hued Media Center interface, resplendent on the 17-inch 1440-by-900-pixel screen, makes downloading and moving through TV listings a breeze. The screen, driven by the most powerful video components available for a notebook, including an NVidia GeForce FX Go5700 video chip with 128MB of RAM, produced a slightly grainy full-screen TV picture. But it was fine for casual viewing, and sharp in a small window. When you aren't watching your favorite TV programs, the interface is a comfortable place to view your high-resolution digital photographs, play music, or download movies from the Internet.

The Satellite boasts Harman/Kardon stereo speakers in the palm rests and a useful set of audio buttons on the front, with a separate volume wheel on the left. The speakers emit clear, rich sound compared with most other notebooks' audio, but they could be louder. There was just enough volume to watch a DVD movie in a quiet room. A subwoofer also would have been a welcome addition on an entertainment unit like this Satellite.

The Satellite is a big notebook, measuring 1.8 inches tall and weighing almost 10 pounds, not counting the power adapter--and, like most large notebooks, it suffers from terrible battery life. In our tests it lasted just 1.2 hours on one charge. The TV tuner takes up the battery bay; we endured several instances of accidentally shutting down the notebook before we finally remembered to swap out the tuner before unplugging from the wall.

In our speed tests, the 3.2-GHz Pentium 4 desktop chip-equipped Satellite earned a WorldBench 5 score of 78, 1 percent above the average for similar CPUs and 4 percent higher than the average figure for notebooks with the 1.6-GHz/600-MHz Pentium M processor. Toshiba has you covered in the documentation department with fine manuals provided in print and on the hard drive.

Upshot: The Satellite and Microsoft's Media Center team up to make a near-perfect desktop replacement and entertainment portable. We would boost the stereo speakers, but the $2699 price is more than fair, considering everything you get.

Carla Thornton