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The Laptop as a Home Theater?

Posted by Cliff on from the take-the-theater-with-you dept.

m.o asks "I am going to buy a laptop soon, and I was wondering if I could find something that would also work as a home theater, i.e. I could connect it to the TV and play DVDs and also connect it to several speakers (say, four speakers and a subwoofer) for the sound. Are there laptops like that? What is the minimum/recommended configuration for such a thing?" Hmmm....interesting idea. Gives me a reason to go out and snag another laptop! *grin!*

1 of 13 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Things to look out for by costas · · Score: 3
    I own a Gateway Solo (PII 300PE) with the Kingmax DVD PC card you mentioned and a G1 DVD (Matshita). I've had it hooked up to a 40" TV and a 4-speaker Dolby-able stereo. Quality of picture and sound (including high-speed motion) was exceptional (at least equal to component DVD players I've seen). Problems I've had:

    Only one movie had motion compensation problems -- "Ronin" during some action sequences. And if you've seen "Ronin" you understand. But this may be related to...

    ... a short time later, the player started seriously skipping. Since the laptop was under warranty, Gateway fixed it. No problems since.

    The really irritating thing about having a laptop as a component is the lack of a remote. Also the fact that if the laptop starts doing anything, for any reason (say fetch e-mail, start a virus scan, etc) the DVD will most likely skip.

    OTOH, all this was with a first generation (1x) DVD and 64MB of RAM ... I think they're up to 4x DVDs now, so skipping should be much less noticable...

    engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.