Sony brings the high-end living room PC up-to-date

The VAIO XL3 comes with all the living room bells and whistles.

(Credit: Sony)

We're sure Sony's VAIO XL3 Digital Living Room System will not be the last living room PC we hear of at the show with a laundry list of new features, but it might be the most comprehensive from a major PC vendor. A Blu-ray DVD burner, CableCard support for digital cable reception, and Windows Vista Home Premium are the highlights. By incorporating all of these new features into a system right away, Sony shows that, if it has given up on the standard desktop PC, it remains serious about the living room computer.

An Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of memory, a 500GB hard drive, and a GeForce 7600 GTL graphics card with an HDMI output round out the specs. It also comes with both NTSC and ATSC tuners, for analog cable and over-the-air HD, respectively. That's a little shy of what we might expect from a typical $3,300 PC, but we also know that neither those Blu-ray burners nor the Sony-engineered component-style chassis (which we've seen before) come cheap. It hits the stores in March along with the rest of Sony's new PCs.