Toshiba Corp. plans to announce a new laptop model next week that allows users to watch TV on it without having to boot up the computer's Windows operating system - the first in what analysts say will be a new crop of multimedia notebooks to come.

Its hard to work why someone has not thought of this and marketed it before - you can click on the TV with the laptop's remote control or watch a DVD movie without having to go through the all-too-familiar process of starting the accompanying Windows Media Center operating system. And although for users to pause the TV or record shows they will still have to boot Windows, the ability to simple watch TV without any OS running is a wonderful step forward for laptops in general.