Laptops.  It’s not really that long ago that they were like prize oxen: ridiculously priced, thick, slow and heavy.  For all their vaunted portability, even as recently as four or five years ago most top-end laptops were still cumbersome beasts, with performance generally shamed by their desktop cousins, unless you wanted to spend the equivalent of a small family car.
Many people, myself included, eschewed them as an unnecessary power toy: You had a computer at work, and a computer at home, why have a laptop too? The lesser processor speeds, tiny screens and generally uncomfortable user position made them undesirable to work on and, for the average user, they were simply an incredibly expensive memory stick, with delusions of grandeur.
If you wanted something smaller then you could go for the Notebook option – a fine distinction that generally meant longer battery life, smaller dimensions and lighter weight, while eschewing things like optical drives and providing minuscule keyboards that could only be used by people with hands that resembled Stickle Bricks.
Time marches on though, and in the ICT world time generally sprints.  The laptop of today, therefore, is a thoroughly different experience.  Sure, the general form is the same – integral screen sits on a keyboard with a trackpad/pointing device built in -  but if you could go back five years and drop Sony’s Vaio SZ61VN/X into someone’s lap, it would be like their prize ox had just wandered into the kitchen on its hind legs and poured itself a cup of tea.
With its dual-core processor, wide-screen format, full-size keyboard, wireless networking, bluetooth, built-in video camera and fingerprint security features, the Vaio SZ61VN/X  Ultra-Portable Laptop Notebook (to give it its full name) sounds like a meaty competitor on paper, yet in the flesh the slimline chassis is only a little thicker than the monitor flap on my old Toshiba laptop.  Pick up an A4 slimline ring-binder and you’ll have a good idea of the dimensions of Sony’s beast.  
And beast it is, with that 2.4GHz core2Duo processor backed up with 2GB of DDR2 RAM and hefty 200GB Hard Drive.  It stood up well to the benchmark tests we threw at it, turning in results that left my old 3GHz desktop rig weeping in embarrassment in all areas bar the display tests.  Even here though, the 831MB onboard GeForce 8400M GPU wasn’t totally without bite – while random pixel results were lacklustre, results for floodfills, polygon and shape plotting were all prodigious.
In fact, the display is where the Vaio SZ (I’m sure you can remember the rest of the numbers) both shines and falls down.  It is a perfect example of opposing extremes which act to cancel each other out.  For every flaw there is something excellent, for each excellence there is a gnawing flaw.
Take, for instance the form  of the display itself:– it is thin. Not slimline: Thin.  We’re talking the short side of 4 millimetres thin.  While this lends to the beautiful overall form of the SZ it also makes for a worryingly flexible, almost flimsy-feeling screen, so keep it well clear of the kids.  
The actual display is a pin-sharp and eye-wateringly clear 13.3” widescreen, with a native resolution of 1280×800. Its quick response time means no blur or ghosting even when watching action flicks on the onboard DVD writer, and its huge contrast ratio ensures deep black and bright, bright whites with no bleeding.
Unfortunately though, Sony have coated the entire thing with what must be the most reflective transparent material known to man, and use a back-light that suffers from severe vignetting  when viewed from anywhere other than face on, the net result being a beautifully clear display that is only beautifully clear when from the most perfect of angles.
Still,  this is really the only let down for the Vaio and, while it is a major concern, it is somewhat offset by the performance and rich feature set of the rest of the machine.
Look Mommy, that cow’s moonwalking!

_{Although written by the author of Helluva.co.uk, this review first appeared in ICT for Education magazine from Lima Publishing, and is reproduced with their kind permission.}