James Fee
10-06-2004, 07:00 PM
<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,118053,00.asp' target='_blank'>http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,118053,00.asp</a><br /><br /></div>"<i>The HP Pavilion Media Center PC M1050y handles nearly every multimedia task except for popping your popcorn. It is the most expensive PC we have tested recently, but justifies its $5100 price tag with a huge, high-definition LCD and extensive features. The monitor alone accounts for about $2000 of the price. The M1050y covers almost all the bases: It has a coaxial TV connection, as well as S-Video and composite video ports, and an FM radio antenna that connects to the TV tuner card. In addition, there's a removable hard drive for toting your video files around town. The expansive 23-inch HP F2304 LCD monitor, which recently earned 4.5 stars in our review, rendered text that looked remarkably sharp even from a distance. Colors and details in photos, and especially in DVD movies, looked terrific on the wide screen. The LCD displays at up to 1920-by-1200 resolution and supports HDTV, though the PC doesn't come with an HDTV tuner card. Of course, should you want to do actual work with this PC, you could use all that screen real estate to view multiple or large application windows. The M1050y we tested sports a 3.6-GHz Pentium 4 560 processor accompanied by 1GB of DDR400 SDRAM and a ATI Radeon X600 Pro graphics card with 256MB of RAM and a TV tuner, as well as a DVI-out port.</i>"<br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/118053-23581_fr.jpg" /><br /><br />These media center PCs are getting to be really expensive, but if you have the money, this HP looks to be the real deal. Those specs could make just about anyone's mouth water (at least until they look at the price tag). 8O