One of the Dynadock's claims to fame is its discrete audio/video hardware, which lets you use an external display and audio gear. Once everything was set up, I decided to take the external display functions for a spin by catching up with The Simpsons on Hulu.

Make no mistake: While watching video is certainly possible with the Dynadock Wireless U, it's not always pretty. In battery conservation mode, the display connected to the Dynadock Wireless U teetered between somewhat watchable and barely watchable while the Alienware's laptop display worked fine. Once I brought it up to high performance mode, the Dynadock-connected display dropped far fewer frames, but there was still some noticeable skipping compared to the laptop display.

Testing with the older ThinkPad yielded similar results--HD YouTube videos that played full-screen without complaint on the ThinkPad's display showed noticeable lagging in a window on the Dynadock-connected display and simply refused to play full-screen. Lower-resolution videos (we used 320 by 240 and 480 by 320 clips) played back splendidly, but a 1080i clip looked like a slide show.

Audio worked fine--nothing lagged, and there was no discernable difference in quality.