Wisegal part 3 But when it

Wisegal part 3

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 wisegal part 3 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 wisegal part 3 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 design 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 choice for early-adopter consumers and professionals alike. The drive itself is handsome, sporting a dark chassis with an elegant bevel design, and the Blu-ray Disc logo prominently displayed on the top surface. The rear section of the drive is ventilated; at the back, youll also find the power switch. Inside, the unit incorporates the Matshita Panasonic SW-5582 internal BD drive. Unlike the first Blu-ray Disc PC recorder that we evaluated, the Pioneer BDR-101A, this model supports the full gamut of optical CD, DVD and Blu-ray Disc recording. Its specs do match those of the Pioneer model in some respects: 2X BD-R write-once and BD-RE rewritable write speed, 2X BD-R/RE read speed and up to 8X write speed on single-layer DVD-R and R.