Could your next laptop double as an HTPC?
by Darren Murph 
posted Aug 16th 2008 at 5:15PM
notebook posts
Samsung's M55 laptop gets HD DVD burner upgrade
by Donald Melanson posted Mar 1st 2007 at 2:39PM
Samsung's M55 laptop has already been tricked out with Blu-ray and HD DVD players, but the company doesn't seem to have run out of HD goodies just yet, now adding an HD DVD burner to its lineup of portable high def offerings. Apart from that notable addition, the laptop also comes loaded with a Core 2 Duo T7200 processor in place of the earlier model's T2500, along with 2GB of RAM, a 120GB hard drive, a GeForce 7600 graphics card with 256MB of VRAM and, of course, that same big 1920x1200 17-inch display. As you can no doubt guess, all that largess comes at quite a cost, with the laptop setting you back the local equivalent of $3,200. Competing for those HD dollars is Toshiba's recently announced HD DVD burner-equipped Qosmio G30 laptop, which PC World reports went on sale in Japan over the weekend, demanding an equally pricey $3,085.Read - Akihabara News, Samsung M55
Read - PC World, Toshiba Qosmio G30
Cuban teams with Dell to offer bundled HDNet Blu-ray content
by Darren Murph posted Dec 14th 2006 at 10:35AM
Now that Dell's riding high on the Blu-ray bandwagon, what more could you ask for when picking up that now-BD-equipped M1710? How about a free flick from Mark Cuban? While we can hear the groaning in the back, ole Mark has decided to plug his very own HDNet by partnering with Dell and tossing in a free Blu-ray title -- "HDNet World Report Special: Shuttle Discovery's Historic Mission" -- with each XPS M1710 notebook. Although further details on the deal weren't readily available, it was implied that future Blu-ray equipped machines would also grace buyers with free BD titles of Cuban's choosing, and while you might not agree with Mark's antics, you can't really complain with free.SavRow AXEN-X1 notebook with dual GPUs but no WMCE
by Kevin C. Tofel posted Feb 15th 2006 at 12:06PM
We got all excited thinking that the SavRow AXEN-X1 notebook
would make a sweet mobile DTV solution, but as we dug a little more the disappointment set in. The $4,000 system
sports dual NVIDIA Go 7800 GTX graphics cards paired with a 19-inch
widescreen display capable of 1680 x 1050 pixels. Sounds promising for some expensive 720p high-def right? Then we hit
the system configurator because if we're willing drop four-grand, why not go all in?Unfortunately, there's no option to upgrade from Windows XP Home Edition to Windows Media Center Edition, so it logically follows why we didn't see an option for a DTV tuner either. Clearly the AXEN-X1 is geared towards gamers, but at that price you can snag an Xbox 360 and have enough left over for three 34-inch widescreens from Sony. Maybe it's just us, but perhaps the DTV tuner inclusion rule should start applying to these monster notebooks and not just televisions.
[via i4u]
