Digital Home Thoughts: Updated hp zd7000 Desktop Replacement Reviewed

"We loved previous iterations of HP's widescreen multimedia portable ("The Coolest Home PCs: Desktop Replacement Notebooks," November 25, 2003), and we like the new build of the HP Pavilion zd7000 desktop replacement just as much. HP has stepped up the processing power with a desktop-spec 3.2-GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition chip and boosted the hard drive capacity (to 80GB) and RAM (to 1GB). These improvements are reflected in the price, but they also make the zd7000 a top contender among multimedia notebooks."

This is the notebook I've decided to get - now it's a matter of deciding upon the configuration. Nice to see that PC Magazine still likes the zd7000 even with this new configuration. For me, this laptop will be used for one main things: digital media authoring. Yes, I know it's not overly portable, but I'm willing to put up with that, and the horrible battery life, in order to get something with a big screen and a lot of power under the hood.

The specs I want to get: 3.2 Ghz (the Extreme Edition is too much of a premium), XP Pro, 1 GB RAM (2 x 512 MB), 80 GB 5400 RPM, 4x DVD+RW/R, 802.11g, 17" BrightView 1680 x 1050 screen, 128 MB nVidia GeForce FX5700, and the docking station. Wait a second - they've removed the option to add Windows Media Center 2004! :? They still mention it in the main text though - perhaps it's just a glitch. I hope so, because I really wanted that option.

I also have to wonder that with the sheer size of this notebook, why couldn't they find space for a second battery to give it a good four hours of battery life? At any rate, I'm drooling with anticipation over getting this beast... 8)