Suicide kings part 1 Like the

Suicide kings part 1

Like the Vaio, the Toshiba TOSBF Qosmio is a desktop-replacement class machine that boasts a huge 17-inch screen and weighs in at a hefty 10 pounds. Its one of the machines I consider portable, but not really mobile. Since a big part of the reason for considering the Qosmio is watching videos, let me start there. For watching movies on a large-screen notebook PC, the Qosmios screen is simply the best Ive seen in this product class. There are no dead zones where the image is darker around the edges; the brightnessoften low on rival machinesis suitably high; and images from even standard definition DVDs are crisp, fluid, and excellent. The sound is great too. The machine boasts a pair of powerful Harmon Kardon speakers embedded in the body just below the screen and, when turned up to maximum volume, they will fill a small room adequately. HD FALLS SHORT. As usual, Toshiba is kind enough to put a silver volume control to the right of the keyboard, making it easy to change the sound on the fly without needing to muck about with a mouse or search for a suicide kings part 1 volume button. Its in areas like thisas well as the placement of media controls along the top of the keyboardbuttonswhere Toshibas expertise in the consumer electronics business shines through. But when it comes to taking advantage of HD-DVD capabilities, the Qosmio comes up short. First, we tried out a demo disk supplied by Toshiba that had trailers and other content. It looked great, and once video playback began, it went without a hitch. But loading up the disk didnt go as smoothly. I wasnt able to get the HD-DVD to play automatically on insertion. And after opening the play program manually, it took half a minute before play began. The demo disk also didnt have one of HD-DVDs cool new features: the ability to pull up and click through the title menu at any time during playback without stopping the video. So I popped in another HD-DVD I had lying around, Enter the Dragon. Although it worked most of the time, I had trouble getting the title menus to pop up during playback. Worse, I wasnt able to click any of the menus at all with my cursor and was forced to use the keyboard. Perhaps of even greater concern is that some HD-DVDs failed to play properly. KEYBOARD ISSUES. We understand these problems stem from the bundled WinDVD HD for Toshiba software, rather than the drive, and software upgrades aimed at improving performance are available from Toshiba. Still, were left with the impression that the Qosmios HD-DVD features werent quite ready for prime time. And unlike the Vaio, the Qosmios drive is read-only, so you wont be doing any recording though at 2, 999, its priced about 500 less than the Vaio. Nor was I impressed with the keyboard. The keys are flat-topped, so as I typed, my hands lost their bearings a bit, yielding lots of typos. This is strange because Toshiba has so often excelled at producing notebook keyboards. As with other machines in its class, this one runs Microsofts MSFT Windows XP Media Center Edition, so it serves as a repository for all of your digital music and video files. It will also connect to your TV set-top box to display and record your favorite shows. WHATS INSIDE. Its got a sizable 200 GB worth of hard drive space to handle pretty much whatever you want to store. Of the machines in this class tested so far, this isnt the biggest storage capacityFujitsu still reigns supreme there with 320 GBbut it beats Dells DELL XPS M17 Internally, this Qosmio is impressive as well. Theres an Intel INTC Core Duo T2500 processor rated at 2 GHz an Nvidia NVDA GeForce Go 7600 for handling graphics. The Qosmio boasts some fine computing and display features. But it carries a high price tag for a machine that has yet to work out its HD-DVD kinks this early in the next-gen format wars. Although its price is far from economical, the BRD-UM2/U has good performance, a stylish suicide kings part 1 and solid features. PC World Canada rating: 87, Very Good. The trickle of Blu-ray Disc devices continues with I-O Datas BRD-UM2/U, the second PC Blu-ray burner to be put through its paces in the PC World Test Center. With its well-rounded specs and solid software bundle, this external USB 0 drive is a fine suicide kings part 1 for early-adopter consumers and professionals alike.