The Sony Vaio VGC-LA1 uses laptop technology to build a proper PC into the back of a widescreen TFT screen. The screen looks enormous but actually measures 19 inches on the diagonal.

On each side of the screen there are grilles for the relatively feeble stereo speakers and at the top and bottom of the screen is a clear bezel that not only looks incredibly funky but also fulfils a number of functions, besides carrying some conspicuous Sony and Vaio branding.

The bottom bezel doubles up as a stand in conjunction with a fold-out arm at the rear, while the top bezel carries a 1.3-megapixel Web-cam. When you turn the LA1 on a green power symbol appears in the top bezel, hologram-style, by guiding light through a channel in the Perspex, and when you drop to stand-by the symbol turns red. Sony uses a similar trick in the bottom bezel to show hard drive and wireless activity.

Behind the scenes the LA1 uses hardware that could either be described as tried and trusted or slightly long in the tooth. The CPU is a Socket 479 Intel Core Duo T2600 that runs at 1.83GHz on a 667MHz FSB, with a Sony motherboard that uses an Intel i945PM chipset with ICH7 Southbridge and 1GB of PC2-4300 RAM in two SODIMMs to give dual channel. In PCMark05 v1.01 we got a score of 3,791 marks and in 3DMark05 v1.20 we got 1,688 marks from the Nvidia GeForce Go 7400 graphics package which uses 256MB of RAM.

The rest of the hardware consists of Marvell LAN, 802.11a/b/g wireless, a Western Digital 300GB hard drive and a slot-loading Matsushita DVD-RAM drive which can write dual layer DVD, plus SigmaTel HD audio. The DVD drive is mounted vertically on the right-hand side so it's a little fiddly to insert discs unless you look carefully to find the slot, as you have to reach around the transparent bezel mentioned above.

This PC is all about home entertainment rather than gaming, so Sony loads it with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2002 SP2 and includes an AVerMedia Hybrid MPEG card so you can watch TV. Windows XP MCE uses a 'ten foot' interface so Sony includes an MCE remote control as well as a wireless keyboard and mouse.

The keyboard has a folding cover so you can have just the media keys exposed, but there's a limit to how far you can sit from a 19-inch TV and we'd suggest that it's considerably less than ten feet (or three metres for the younger readers).

The specification and performance is similar to that of a laptop that sells for £500-£700, although you wouldn't get the large screen or 1,680 x 1,050 resolution, but Sony doesn't give you much else for your money. The software package consists of a stack of Sony utilities plus InterVideo WinDVD 5, Photoshop Elements 4.0, Premiere Elements 2.0, SonicStage Backup, Roxio, Microsoft Works 8 and a 60-day trial version of Microsoft Office 2003, which is something that you can download for free from Microsoft anyway.

The Vaio VGC-LA1 is immensely stylish and manages to look nothing like a regular PC, which is a very good thing indeed. Although it is loaded with features we can't help but think that Sony is charging a hefty premium for its name, which means that students and teenagers, who ought to be queuing up to buy the thing in their droves, will probably choose to buy a cheaper laptop instead.