Sony tends to be associated with the glamour, big price-tag end of the portables market, but the Vaio PCG-FX405 is undoubtedly intended as a bread and butter product. It is powered by a 1GHz AMD Athlon processor bracketed by a realistic 256MB of RAM and the expected 20GB hard disk.

The optical drive is a nice bonus, combining 8-speed DVD and 24x/8x/8x CD-RW in a single unit. It's fixed, not modular, but you can remove the floppy drive and replace it with a second battery.

You might consider this in the light of the fairly feeble battery life of a little over an hour, but beware the weight: the chunky, 49mm thick machine already tips the scales at 3.3kg and another battery is going to make it seriously hefty.

The screen on the Sony Vaio PCG-FX405 is a little larger than average at 15 inches, but still works in the usual 1024 x 768 (XGA) resolution. The result is a pleasure to behold all the same; large, readable and bright. The keyboard is equally agreeable thanks to large keys where they are needed - notably Enter, Backspace and Spacebar - and a sensible layout that places everything where you'd expect it to be.

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As is true of many notebooks, the graphics subsystem of the Sony Vaio PCG-405 is fine for running 2D business applications but is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a replacement for a desktop 3D card. The Vaio is fitted with an 8MB ATI Rage Mobility-M1 chip, a no-frills but perfectly adequate choice which is much the sort of thing you'd expect on an entry-level notebook like this.

Networking capability as well as a modem seems to be a standard feature on most notebooks, so the Vaio scores a point for having both. This probably removes the need for the pair of PC Card slots, but they are there if you need them.

The traditional parallel and serial ports are present alongside a pair of USB sockets, so you will have no trouble hooking up existing peripherals. There's also an expansion bus so you could opt for the additional convenience of a port replicator. Digital photography enthusiasts might well find a use for the Firewire (IEEE1394) port as a means of importing pictures for editing or output to the CD-RW.

Overall, there is much to like, but the Sony Vaio PCG-FX405 is not without its imperfections. There's the battery life, of course, and we weren't too keen on the rather flimsy construction of the lid either. The machine would have been more appealing if it were a little thinner and - it has to be said - perhaps a bit cheaper too.