Sony's VGN-AR41L is one of the desktop replacement Vaio laptops and, although it's an imposing size (and, for that matter, weight; 4.6kg with the power brick), it seems to lack the style you get with smaller notebooks in the Vaio line-up.

Powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo T7100 processor clocked at 1.8GHz, the VGN-AR41L isn't going to win any performance awards but it will do all the usual mundane office jobs without any problems. And with the processor being dual core, at least you can run jobs like virus scans in the background without taking too much of a hit in foreground performance.

Supporting the processor is 2GB of PC2-5300 DDR2 memory which is the about the standard fitment these days in a notebook with Vista installed (the VGN-AR41L comes with Vista Home Premium); in any case this is the maximum amount of memory that the motherboard supports.

While it's not the most stylish Vaio we have ever seen, even in its black and silver finish, it is quite thin for a desktop replacement, measuring just 33mm high with the lid shut. Talking of the lid, the lock/release slider is placed in quite an awkward position on the front underside of the chassis.

Once you open the lid you are met by an expanse of black, but in spite of the size of the chassis you don't get a separate numeric pad, and the positioning of the keyboard to the trackpad also causes some concern. The keyboard is placed so far up the chassis that you can get your whole wrist on the wrist pad which makes for comfortable typing. That's good, but downside is that the trackpad is placed right at the bottom of the chassis making it impossible to access with your thumbs while you type. Because the trackpad is placed so far down the chassis the mouse buttons end up being edge-mounted and completely out of the way when you are typing; not very useful at all.

The 17-inch WXGA+ screen has a native resolution of 1,440 by 900 pixels and uses Sony's well-known X-Black technology that's excellent for watching DVD movies. Output for the screen is driven by an Nvidia GeForce 8400M GT which has 128MB of dedicated memory and can access up to 703MB of system memory for a total of 831MB.

Housed in the front right-hand chassis area are two flash card readers; one, as you might expect, is for a Memory Stick, but sitting under it is a reader that supports SD cards. Next to these is the on/off switch for the 802.11a/b/g wireless LAN.

For storage Sony has fitted the VGN-AR41L with a 120GB Fujitsu hard drive and you also get both Express Card and PC Card slots. These sit in the right-hand side of the chassis along with two USB 2.0 ports and two flaps that hide most of the remaining ports.

The smaller flap to the rear of the chassis hides the modem (V.90 56kbps) and wired Gigabit LAN ports, while the larger one hides VGA and S-Video ports, a 4-pin Firewire port and an HDMI port. For some reason Sony has marked the smaller flap so you know what's behind it, but has neglected to mark the bigger one the same way.

As with all Sony notebooks there is a huge amount of software preloaded to get you up and running (takes a deep breath): SonicStageCP 4.2 and SonicStage Mastering Studio 2.3 for audio editing, Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0, Vaio Photo and Video Suite, Vaio Edit Components 6.0 and WinDVD 8.0 manage your video and TV needs while Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 helps you sort out your picture collection.

To help burn optical disks there is Easy Media Creator 9 and Click to DVD 2.6. Bundled office apps are Adobe Acrobat Standard 8.0, Adobe Reader 8.0, Microsoft Works 8.5 and Microsoft Office 2007 60-day trial (Try & Buy). To help keep your Vaio secure there is Norton Internet Security 2007 (with 90 days free virus updates) and, last but not least, you get Vaio Recovery Utility 2.6, a hard drive recovery utility, Skype and Google's software package.

This is a well-rounded desktop replacement laptop with a good list of features and reasonable performance. However, the placement of the trackpad and mouse buttons in relation to the keyboard is a real source of annoyance, as neither of these is properly accessible while you type.