Introduction

The usual perception and definition of desktop replacement notebooks as behemoths have just taken another smudge with the availability of BenQ's Joybook 7000. Bulky, heavy and colossal are usually words in direct affiliation with desktop replacement notebooks and we have seen our share of these performance machines over the past year or so. While current notebooks of this genre are still going to consume a considerable amount of your desktop space, newer notebooks are in fact shrinking in both weight and dimension. By now, it should be pretty clear as to why this downsizing is possible. We foresaw the eventual ousting of the mighty Pentium 4 processors by the leaner and less power-hungry Intel Pentium-M flavors last year and this pattern we're observing today is indeed going the way of our prediction.


The latest Joybook 7000 from BenQ is more than just an unadorned notebook bearing the Centrino badge. Under its magnesium alloy shell is a Pentium-M 1.5GHz (Dothan) and an ATI MOBILITY RADEON 9700 screaming to be abused. Combine these components with a 14-inch wide-screen display and you'll have a multimedia machine out of the box – these are just the hardware part of the equation and we'll get to the software side in a short while. For the uninitiated, BenQ is the first in the world (again) to introduce 14-inch wide-screen displays into notebooks. In fact, BenQ is probably the only manufacturer in the industry that places more emphasis in wide-screen notebooks over the conventional 4:3 format versions. Our past experience with BenQ's Joybook 6000 has been pleasant. Will the Joybook 7000 reproduce the same positive impression for our review today? That's what we intend to uncover over the next few pages.