Hewlett-Packard Australia Pavilion zd8004AP

Its been a while since we saw a multimedia desktop replacement notebook as classy as this.

The highlight of our test model is most definitely its bright 17" screen. It has a great viewable angle, a high contrast coating and native resolution of 1440 x 900 pixels. The notebook comes with an ATI Mobility Radeon X600 graphics controller with 128MB of video memory.

The zd8004AP includes a full-size keyboard, complete with dedicated number pad. The extra wide touch pad feels responsive, includes scrolling functionality and can be quickly turned off using the button just above it--great if you're using an external mouse and keep bumping the pad.

Hewlett-Packard has chosen to use a 3.2GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor 640 with Hyper-Threading, together with 512MB of DDR2 memory, an 80GB hard disk and a dual-layer multiformat DVD writer. Our test results showed this combination offered excellent performance but minimal battery life.

When you're not watching DVDs (using the bundled remote control) or playing games on this big (4.3kg) but beautiful notebook, you may want to transfer photos from your digital camera using the six-in-one media card reader, four USB 2.0 slots or single FireWire port. Alternatively, you can connect to almost any network, as Ethernet, 56Kbps modem, Bluetooth and 802.11b/g Wi-Fi networking connections are all integrated.

An S-Video TV-out port is also included, as is a connection port for HP's optional xb2000 notebook expansion base. HP has also included what it calls its USB Digital Drive: a bay for its own special high-capacity digital storage media. The zd8004AP also has one Type II PC card slot and one of the newer ExpressCard slots for connecting high bandwidth peripherals.

HP also provides a fantastic software bundle that's perfect for work and study, home movie creation and media centre-style playback. A one-year warranty rounds out a notebook that any multimedia buff would love.