From the rarefied heights of Dells Inspiron 8100 (reviewed October 2001, page 71) we take a step back with the Toshiba Tecra 9000. Like the Inspiron 8100 the Tecra is a Pentium III-M CPU, from the Tualatin family of processors, although this is the 933MHz version.

Life in the old dog yet, according to trade association.

Widescreen is still one of the flavours of the month for notebooks and plenty of users are opting to banish boring old 4:3 aspect ratio LCD panels to the land of wind and ghosts.

Just where do you start? Best point would be to introduce this Vaio as the first commercial offering designed and built from the ground up for Windows XP. The next point is simply that this is the most visually stunning notebook we have seen in a long time.