HP Digital Entertainment Center

Convergence, once a dirty word in the PC business, is no longer taboo. Leading the pack is HP with its Digital Entertainment Center. Designed for Hi–Def TV owners and running Microsoft’s latest TV-friendly Media Center Operating System, it combines two television tuners, a personal video recorder, digital video recorder, recordable DVD drive, Intel's optimized 7.1 surround-sound chipset, a huge 360 GB hard drive, integrated Wi-Fi, Ethernet, and all the AV inputs and outs (cable/satellite, component).

But HP offers a twist—a removable hard drive, called the Personal Media Drive, that pops out of the front of the unit and allows you to not only save all of your digital content, but take it anywhere.

The 160 MB Personal Media Drive is about the size of a Kate Spade purse. It pops in and out of the Digital Entertainment Center and has a USB port that allows playback on any USB-equipped PC or device. Imagine taking every digital image to grandma’s for the ultimate slide show, walking the Sopranos over to your neighbor’s for playback on his/her PC, or simply backing up all your important files and storing the drive in the family safe or lockbox. You can have one or more PMDs. The Digital Entertainment Center still has 200MB of internal memory without it.

The z-540 Digital Entertainment Center starts at $1499 and the z-545b starts at $1999. Couple the DEC with any of HPs new Hi-Def TV’s and you have the Ultimate Entertainment Experience or the best Couch Potato Experience in town.

Note: Also available is a smaller single tuner Digital Entertainment Center ($1,499) and desktop system . www.hp.com