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Entertainment laptops
Entertainment laptopsare ideal for people who want to access their home movies, audio tracks, digital photos, DVDs, and more on a relatively compact, transportable system. Entertainment laptops usually weigh 10 pounds or more and feature battery runtimes well under 2 hours, thus being inappropriate for road warriors. But if you’re going for a vacation, and want to choose your own film and music for your end-of-day lounging in your hotel room, an entertainment laptop is the best choice.
An entertainment laptop needs enough storage capacity to hold all your recorded shows, given the ability of some entertainment notebooks to record TV programs with TiVo-like convenience. 80GB to 100GB capacities are typically standard in this class of laptop. You should also opt for a hard drive that spins at 5,400 rpm or faster.
Watching TV shows and DVDs wouldn’t be much fun on a 14-inch display. Entertainment laptops often feature 16- or 17-inch displays that usually boast widescreen aspect ratios of 16:10, which is ideal for watching films in their original letterbox formatting.
Besides a FireWire port for inputting video From a digital camcorder, a good entertainment laptop will offer a fast DVD burner with double-layer support that allows you to write 4 hours of video instead of the standard 2 hours you can get onto a single-layer disc. Entertainment laptops also offer flash memory card readers, providing the perfect way to get photos off your digital camera and onto the laptop.
An Athlon 64 3000+, 3-GHz Pentium 4, or 2-GHz Pentium M or faster processor is required for Playing DVD movies without any delay, recording DVD-quality MPEG-2 video in real time, touching up digital photos, and editing video footage. In order to keep that speedy processor fed with a steady supply of data, 512MB is the minimum amount of DDR memory these laptops need. For gaming, this laptop should offer an ATI Mobility Radeon or Nvidia GeForce Go graphics processor with at least 64MB of video RAM.
The pros:
• large displays
• good media controls
• replaces bulky audio/video equipment
The cons:
• very large and heavy sometimes
• short battery life
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