16, Jan, 2025
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Pioneer Power 470K

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Pioneer’s Windows Media Center notebook is a powerhouse, but doesn’t fully support the OS.
Windows Media Center Edition 2005 hit the market with a splash. The entertainment PC is finally a reality, and now companies such as Toshiba and Pioneer are preparing MCE notebooks that will take traditionally couch-bound activities out of the lounge room and on the road.
Pioneer’s machine is built around an AMD 3400+ processor mated to 1GB RAM, 60GB 7,200rpm Hitachi 2.5in hard disk and ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 video chipset with 128MB RAM. Thanks to the top end processor, fast hard disk and ample memory it scored some excellent results in our standard notebook benchmarks.
To round out the specs, the Pioneer also includes an 8x DVD±RW Dual Layer burner, a v.92 modem, Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire and legacy parallel and serial ports. The notebook measures 28 x 40 x 4cm (HWD) and weighs 3.85kg without its eight-cell Lithium-ion battery.
Pioneer has included a USB Dreamvision DVT-B digital TV receiver — a great little unit, but it adds to the bulk. It’s also incompatible with MCE 2005; you can watch and record TV through the DVT-B software, but TV mode isn’t available through the MCE2005 interface. As with the tuner, the video card chipset is an excellent performer but isn’t directly supported by the OS. A workaround is provided with the system that allows you to use the Nvidia NVDVD playback codec, which is sold with the system.
A second external USB IR receiver is provided, purely for the Microsoft MCE 2005 remote control, adding further to the amount of material required to maintain functionality on the move. As the notebook has only three USB 2.0 ports, using both the DVB-T and the IR receiver takes up most of the notebook’s external connections. External devices of this kind are fine on a desktop or HTPC setup, but less than ideal for portable systems.
These issues aside, the notebook is more than adequate to drive MCE2005. Video playback of AVI and MPEG 1 files is crystal clear on the 17in WSXGA (1440 x 900 native) wide-screen LCD panel, and DVD performance is excellent. Testing on a TV monitor using the system’s S-Video connection showed good results, though the resolution on the LCD panel had to be dropped to 1,024 x 768 for the video chipset to output a complete image to the screen.

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