Under the blindingly white bonnet the TP2 would seem to deliver the goods. There's a Blu-ray combo drive (Blu-ray player + CD/DVD burner), 2.1 GHz Intel Core2 Duo processor, 2 GB of RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8400M graphics card and a generous 500GB hard drive. It runs Windows Vista Home Premium and comes with a remote control as well as a wireless RF keyboard with a built-in trackpad.

The biggest surprise is the lack of a built-in TV tuner. Sony supplies a USB tuner stick that you need to install yourself, but amazingly it only features a single high-def tuner so you can't watch one program while recording another. Another surprising omission is an eSATA port for adding an external drive, which is annoying since there isn't room for a second hard drive within the unit. Some punters will also be disappointed by the lack of a scrolling LCD readout, but it wouldn't be very practical considering the TP2's shape.

These issues aside the TP2 features pretty much everything you'd want in a media centre PC including front and rear USB ports, mini Firewire, Memory Stick and SD card slots. Onboard 10/100 Ethernet and 802.11a/b/g wifi let you get online. From an AV perspective, it features HDMI and RGB video outputs along with analogue and SP/DIF digital audio. Sony also throws in a HDMI cable and a three month subscription to the IceTV Electronic Program Guide.

Fire up the TP2 and you discover an impressively quiet PC (boosting your WAF) that still manages to stay cool. Sony are too cheap to put recovery disks in the box so they first thing you need to do is create you own. At this point we'd also consider investing in a copy of Acronis TrueImage to make it easy to restore you machine if things go pear-shapped. To make things easier, you might want to create a second partition for storing your recordings.

The Blu-ray player is the TP2's big selling point and it's accompanied by the Blu-ray edition of InterVideo's WinDVD software. There's a link to it from the MCE interface but it's not integrated like CyberLink's Blu-ray version of PowerDVD. WinDVD is launched separately when you insert a Blu-ray disc, but thankfully it plays nicely with the MCE remote control. The optical drive is fast and quiet compared to some of the first generation Blu-ray players.

If the TP2 didn't look bad enough, the remote control is also an ugly white brick that feels like cheap plastic and doesn't label enough of the buttons. Unfortunately it's not a universal remote control, so you can't program it to switch on your television and control your AV gear. We'd ditch it straight away in favour of something like a Logitech Harmony universal remote. The RF keyboard on the other hand is a thing of beauty. Looking like it was ripped straight from a notebook computer, it features a full-size keyboard and a track pad that's just as responsive as those on a notebook. It's the perfect size and weight for sitting on your lap and it's a shame Sony doesn't sell it seperately. Our only gripe is that it doesn't feature a row of dedicated multimedia keys.

Allow at least two hours to get the media centre up and running by the time you plug everything in, set up Vista, set up the MCE interface, install the tuner and install the IceTV software. Don't expect a lot of help from Sony in terms of written instructions. Of course the set up is just the beginning - it takes a lot of fiddling about to get Vista and the MCE interface running smoothly. This is where one of our main gripe with the TP2 arises. CONTINUED