You've seen 17-inch-screened desktop-replacement notebooks, but Acer America wants you to see 36 percent more. The new Aspire 9800 laptop flaunts a 20.1-inch widescreen (1,680 by 1,050) display with CrystalBrite high-contrast technology and an 8-millisecond response time, backed by Nvidia's 256MB GeForce Go 7600 graphics accelerator. If that's not enough multimedia potential for you, the 17.2-pound Aspire comes with an HD DVD-ROM drive for viewing high-resolution content and HDMI and HDCP support for showing HD movies and deluxe PC gaming on high-end LCD TVs. (The HD DVD drive is also a dual-layer DVD±RW burner.)

Intel's Core Duo T2600 processor with two 2.16GHz cores and 2MB of Level 2 cache, along with the chipmaker's Mobile 945PM Express chipset and Pro/Wireless 3945ABG wireless network controller, put the Centrino Duo label on the laptop's keyboard. Other features range from 240GB of Serial ATA storage and 2GB of DDR-2/667 memory to Bluetooth, a 1.3-megapixel webcam, two Acer 3DSonic stereo speakers plus subwoofer, and Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 with an analog TV tuner. The Aspire 9800 starts at $2,799.