We've all had the experience of speaking to someone on the phone and having their voice drowned out by the background noise. The problem is usually accentuated with mobile phones and public telephones which by their very nature are prone to this annoyance.

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.

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.