Game on
Playing games is serious business, as any boy who never grew up will tell you in virulent tones. Your basic off-the-shelf computer these days can cope with the entire Microsoft Office suite without raising a sweat. But try running any resource-hungry game on the same machine and your workhorse can turn into a nag in a hurry. The maxim is simple: If you want to play serious games on your computer, invest in some serious hardware — muscle up or wimp out.
Specialized gaming computers with high-end graphics and sound cards have remained a niche market and are almost exclusively desktop machines. Notebook computers have never really had the right stuff for the job, until now that is.
Toshiba is about to bust that notion late next month with the release of its Qosmio WXW/79GW gaming laptop. Powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, it sports 2 gigabytes of DDR3 memory and a 17-inch WSXGA (1,680 × 1,050 resolution) display, pumped by a GeForce 9800M GTX graphics card with a gigabyte of video RAM. It also carries the extras found in most desktop-replacements: DVD burner, USB and Firewire ports, a 4-in-1 card reader, HDMI video out port and a built-in 1.3-megapixel camera to enhance group playing. The premium model (PAWW79GLN21W, ¥350,000) features one more innovation — a 64-gigabyte solid-state drive (SSD) in addition to the 160-gigabyte SATA hard drive. SSDs are faster and consume less power than a regular hard disk and they are quieter.