HP Pavilion dv9292eu

With Sony and Apple traditionally strolling away with the catwalk prizes, it's testament to the HP dv9292eu's design that it got the lion's share of fawning attention in the Labs. With the "imprint" finish to the lid and a glossy 17in screen, the Pavilion is as stylish as anything HP's rivals have produced.

But even more impressive is the sheer range of features. Billed as an entertainment centre, there's a bundled Freeview tuner for the ExpressCard slot. The picture through Vista Home Premium's Media Center looks crisp and vivid on the display, although the 1,440 x 900 resolution is a touch disappointing on such a large screen. But, the Altec Lansing speakers are loud and punchy compared to most notebooks.

When you're not using the TV tuner, the ExpressCard slot becomes a handy storage space for the tiny remote, which is included to control the QuickPlay jukebox function. Without loading Windows you can play music and watch DVDs, extending the surprisingly long battery life even further. We got as much as 3 hours' use out of the HP with a light workload, which is great for what's essentially a desktop-replacement machine.

Portability, of course, isn't exactly the dv9292eu's main selling point, but it nevertheless weighs in at a respectable 3.6kg, rising to 4kg with the power supply. The Pavilion's main strength is at home, as it sports an HDMI interface, ready to hook up to an HDTV and relay photos from the multiformat card reader or video from the huge 160GB hard disk. Plus, there's even room to install a second hard disk.

The inevitable compromises are mostly in the power department. The only AMD processor of the group trails slightly behind the Core 2 Duos, but the Turion 64 X2 TL-60 is certainly no slouch and is ably assisted by 2GB of RAM. Plus, the GeForce Go 7600 graphics are infinitely better than the integrated solutions of the Apple and Sony. As long as you keep the detail settings to reasonable levels, you should be fine playing most games at native resolution.

The single year of collect-and-return warranty is the only other negative in a wonderfully featured notebook. If you want a notebook with a large screen to replace your existing PC, the HP dv9292eu is in a league of its own this month.

Author: David Bayon