October 07, 2008
NOTEBOOKS have been cutting hard into traditional desktop PC sales in the past few years as buyers opted for a neat, all in-one box as their main PC.
The Dell Studio 17 has pleasing looks for a beefy machine
Sony's Vaio VGNFW16G/W shines, literally, is in its screen and Blu-ray drive combo
Toshiba's Satellite Pro P300 is a hefty beast in both size and specs
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Big-screen, desktop replacement notebooks weighing more than 3kg generally aren't built for mobility.
They are OK for lugging from one room to another around the house, where they can handle work tasks during the day and then get carted off to the kid's bedroom to double as a spare entertainment unit.
They usually aren't much fun for globe-trotting, unless you've done some bodybuilding lately.
While their larger screens are tailored for entertainment, desktop replacements can also be skewed with different features, such as fingerprint security scanners, towards the business user.
We set the standard for this week's crop of desktop replacement notebooks at a price of no more than $2500 and a screen size of 17in, although the Sony Vaio looked at here comes in with a screen a smidgin under the bar at 16.4in. The other two contenders are the Dell Studio 17 and Toshiba's Satellite Pro P300.
Dell Studio 17
THE Dell tips the scales at a portly 3.6kg and its sprawling dimensions of 393mmx43mmx289mm mean it won't fit into a garden variety laptop bag.
That said, this stay-at-home notebook has pleasing looks for a beefy machine, with a choice of colours for the screen cover and groovy designer graphics on the light grey plastics around the keyboard.
Other nice touches include an AverMedia TV tuner card in the unit's Expressscard port, so you can catch some boob tube as well as YouTube while you work, and a slot-loading DVD burner rather than the usual, fragile, tray-loading drive.
The review machine came with Dell's range-topping 17in screen, which claimed the highest resolution of the bunch at 1920 by 1200 pixels.
Its computing grunt beats the Sony Vaio and is roughly equivalent to that of the Toshiba P300.
There's an Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 processor running at 2.5GHz, 4GB of RAM of which only 3GB is available under the copy of 32-bit Windows Vista Ultimate the Dell comes loaded with, and a pair of 250GB hard drives. A fingerprint scanner helps with security.
Graphics are wrangled by a 256MB ATI Radeon Mobility HD 3650gpu, which is good enough to run slightly older games, such as the WW2 shooter Brothers in Arms quite smoothly at mid-range resolution.
- Stuart Kennedy
SPECIFICATIONS
Features: TV tuner, slot loading DVD drive, 4GB memory, 17in screen
Price: $2339
More at: www.dell.com.au
Rating: 8/10
Toshiba Satellite Pro P300
LIKE most desktop replacement notebooks, the Toshiba Satellite Pro P300 is a hefty beast in both size and specs.
With its 17in widescreen display and weight of 3.45kg, it definitely feels like you're getting a lot of laptop for your money.
Even though the P300 boasts some of the best technical specs around, bigger ain't always better.
The P300 is most impressive under the hood, where its 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 processor and accompanying 4GB of DDR2 RAM provide plenty of grunt for resource-intensive applications. In fact the P300 is so well endowed with computing grunt that the included 32-bit version of Windows Vista Business (and XP for Windows traditionalists) doesn't even use all 4GB of RAM it has at its disposal.
Another area where the P300 is generous is storage space. Equipped with twin 300GB hard drives, it provides substantially more storage than your average laptop.
If high specs are all you need to be impressed by, stop reading now because in entertainment features the P300 hits a hurdle.
The 17in screen and its native resolution of 1440 by 900 works well with the P300's ATI Mobility Radeon HD3650 graphics card and will allow you to play some older games, but anything newer will struggle.
Also the absence of an HDMI port means you'll have to be content with the outdated S-video port. There's also no television TV tuner or built-in FM radio.
Unfortunately, the emphasis on heavy duty specs comes at the expense of battery life, which severely hampers the P300 in the entertainment arena, while Toshiba's determination not to play nice with Sony's Blu-ray format means the P300 comes equipped with an inferior dual-layer DVD-RW optical drive.
- Mitchell Bingemann
SPECIFICATIONS
Features: 17in screen, 4GB memory, twin 300GB hard drives
Price: $2420
More at: www.toshiba.com.au
Rating: 6/10
Sony Vaio VGNFW16G/W
THE Vaio is smaller and lighter than its Dell and Toshiba competitors, partly by virtue of its slightly smaller 1600 by 900 pixel 16.5in screen.
It's no netbook at 3kg and 384mmx37mmx261mm, but the Sony was noticeably easier to lug around than the Dell or the Tosh and fitted comfortably into our laptop bag. For travel, the Sony is the pick of the trio.
The downside of its more portable nature is less computing muscle. This Vaio has 2GB of memory, a single 250GB hard drive and a 2.4GHz P8600 sitting on Vista Home Premium, coupled to an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3470 graphics processor.
Business users may rue the lack of fingerprint reader security.
Where the Vaio shines, literally, is in its screen and Blu-ray drive combo. The LCD looks superb and while the extra detail from Blu-ray isn't as obvious on a small screen as on, say, a 40in loungeroom telly, it does provide noticeably better depth and clarity over DVD.
- Stuart Kennedy
SPECIFICATIONS
Features: Blu-ray drive, 16.4in screen, slim design, 2GB memory
Price: $2499
More at: www.sony.com.au
Rating: 8/10
CONCLUSION
ANY of these notebooks would make a good, all-round workhorse but for the money the first to be crossed off our shopping list would be the Toshiba P300.
Its disk, memory and processor combination gave good performance and plenty of storage room, but the stolid looking Tosh is devoid of any X factor.
Between the Dell and Sony it's a choice of entertainment value and a measure of real portability versus business value and strong performance.
The Sony gets the nod on the first criterion while the Dell wins on the latter.