Don’t call it a notebook or a laptop, because it’s not. Don’t let its outward appearance fool you, because the nw9440 from HP-Compaq of Japan is so beefy that it’s being called a “mobile workstation.” Marketing speak aside, this 17-inch WSXGA+ TFT LCD screen’d computer rocks an Intel Core Duo T2300E (1.66GHz) processor, the Intel 945M Express chipset, a full gig of DDR2-SDRAM (with options for up to 4GB), and a speedy 7200rpm 80GB SATA hard drive. Still not impressed? Well, it runs on XP Pro too. Pretty impressive, huh?

Other key features include a 256MB NVIDIA Quadro FX 1500M card for graphics, a one touch button for “easy access to presentation mode”, a stereo microphone input, 7-in-1 card reader, and a “super multiple DVD drive.” Connectivity options come by way of integrated Gigabit Ethernet, two flavours of WiFi (b/g) with WLAN security (so many acronyms here, that I’m not going to even bother listing them), and the usual RJ11 and RJ45 ports.

Despite all these rather beefy specs, you can still get up to 4.5 hours out of the 8-cell lithium-ion battery. Available now, the HP-Compaq nw9440 will go for $2,266 as described, or $4,276 if you opt for the speedier T2600 processor and an extra gig of RAM.