In other words, Lenovo's new notebook bends and breaks many of the rules of mobility. But beware: This weighty notebook has a weighty price tag to match -- slightly over $5,000.

At 11.1 lbs. and measuring a gargantuan 2.2 by 16.1 by 12.2 in., the ThinkPad W700ds is about as big as a notebook gets these days -- for example, it's half an inch thicker and two pounds heavier than Toshiba's Qosmio X305. With its huge AC adapter, the W400ds has a ponderous travel weight of 13.2 lbs. That's the weight equivalent of four of Apple's MacBook Air systems; it's sure to overwhelm any airline tray table.

Clothed in ThinkPad basic black, the W700ds has the best components available, starting with a 2.53-GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme processor that has four independent processing cores, 6MB of L2 cache and 64-bit operations. There's also 4GB of memory, an 8X DVD burner and a pair of 250GB, 5,400-rpm hard drives that are set up to across the disks (higher-performance 7,200-rpm drives are also an option). Whether it's for working with a CAD file or making sense of a large Excel file, no notebook on sale today even comes close to this computational monster.

A display two-fer

As if the system's main 17-in. display were not enough, touch the display's right side and a unique 10.6-in. screen pops out. The resulting composite screen can show images with resolution of up to 3200 by 1968 pixels, although there's an annoying 1-in. black strip separating the two displays.