Hi-Grade M6600-2400

Desktop replacement notebooks have taken huge steps over the past year. This is primarily to keep up with the demand for powerful and featured-packed machines to act as primary systems.

Time has even started producing notebooks without batteries, so they never leave your desk but are compact enough to slide into a drawer.

Also, some manufacturers are stating that notebook sales are overtaking desktop PCs for the first time.

As desktop replacements go, the M6600-2400 leaves little to be desired. First, it uses Intel's latest 2.4GHz Mobile Pentium 4 chip, with a 512MB cache that sits on a Sis 645DX chipset.

It also comes with 512MB of DDR memory and a 60GB hard disk, the sort of specs we would expect from a desktop system. Sysmark performance was inevitably impressive at 213 overall, and the speed with which it performed day-to-day tasks was remarkable.

It also gave one of the best battery test scores we've seen from a desktop replacement in many months; over two hours is as much as we could hope for, particularly considering what's inside.

A Geforce 420 Go mobile chip with 32MB of dedicated memory handles 3D graphics. We reviewed this card's main competitor, ATI's Mobility Radeon 9000 chip in November, and found it to be faster and more power efficient, but a score of 4,505 in 3Dmark is perfectly adequate. Anyone requiring more than that shouldn't be using a notebook to play games anyway.

The 15.1in TFT screen is capable of a resolution of 1,280 x 1,024. It's evenly lit across its entire surface and is good to work with.

The M6600-2400 follows a classic silver and black design; it's no head turner, but is gentle on the eye. It's by no means small, and at 3.4kg not exactly light either, but this gives room to fill the periphery with most of the ports and drives you can think of.

The front has headphone, mic-in and volume control, and the left-hand side has a 56K modem socket and a single PC Card slot.

Round the back there are four USB2 ports and a mini-Firewire; again, this is something we rarely see even in desktop PCs let alone notebooks, so we were very impressed. Network, S-Video, serial and parallel ports are also provided.

But what really sets this apart from the sub-£1,800 crowd is the DVD-RW drive and the card reader slots.

The DVD-RW drive writes and rewrites at single-speed; not the fastest drive in the world, but it's still very impressive to fit this into a slim drive. CD-RW speeds are also good enough at 16x 10x 24x.

The memory card reader, placed just above the DVD-RW drive, can read MMC (Multimedia Card), SD (Secure Digital), Smartmedia and Memory Stick cards, though sadly not Compact Flash (CF).

On the downside, there's nothing to keep the cards in place, which means they can slip out easily. That aside, it's easy to use, as cards simply pop up as removable drives in Windows Explorer.

The keyboard is large and comfortable to use. The majority of buttons are positioned in the correct order, although the Enter key has been shrunk to half its usual height to accommodate the backslash key, and the touchpad is angled inwards to the top.

In terms of heat, this could sit on your lap for the length of the battery life before it becomes uncomfortable.

Apple's gorgeous new Powerbook also has a DVD-RW drive, but lacks the raw power and card reader slots provided here, and is more expensive, but it does have weight and looks on its side.

The main advantage of the M6600-2400 is that you're getting the convenience of a laptop combined with the features of a high-end desktop, for only £300 more than you'd expect to pay for a system box.

That's how desktop replacements should be; it's unfortunate that it's taken this long for it to happen.

Specifications:

• 2.4GHz Mobile Pentium 4
• 512MB of DDR memory
• 60GB hard disk
• DVD-RW/CD-RW combo drive
• Sis 645DX chipset
• 15.1in SXGA TFT screen
• Windows XP Home
• 3.4kg
• 332 x 285 x 31mm (w x d x h)
• Two-year collect and return warranty

Contact: Hi-Grade 0800 074 0403
www.higrade.com