Notebook bargain specialist Averatec has announced its largest laptop yet, featuring a 17-inch widescreen display with AveraBrite technology for brighter, sharper graphics and videos. Even with the big LCD and a full-sized keyboard with separate keypad, however, the Averatec 7100 Series is lighter than many rivals at 7.2 pounds.

Available at retailers including Staples, Circuit City, and OfficeMax, the 1.4-inch-thin, DVD±RW-equipped notebook comes with trial versions of ZoneAlarm's firewall, antivirus, and antispam Internet Security Suite 6.0 and Phoenix Technologies' FirstWare Recover Pro for restoring the OS, applications, and data files after a virus attack or disk crash. Estimated prices range from $850 to $1,200, with models ranging from a Mobile AMD Sempron 3000+ system with 512MB of memory and 80GB hard disk to an AMD Turion 64 ML-32 portable with 1GB of DDR, a 100GB hard drive, and Windows XP Media Center Edition. Gigabit wired and 802.11b/g wireless networking are standard.