The TP2 comes with a stock-standard version Windows Vista Home Premium, but media centre users with tell you there a few tweaks are needed to get everything running smoothly. A trip to the forums at www.xpmediacentre.com.au could save you a lot of grief.

So while you're paying Sony top dollar for a media centre PC, you're still left to do all the hard work worrying about things like MCE settings, NVIDIA settings, video codecs and Vista hotfixes. The TP2 is not for newbies, it's for computer enthusiasts who like to tinker. Of course such people would probably rather build their own MCE box, and they could build a better box for the TP2's $AU2399 price tag.

If you don't want the hassle of building your own media centre, you could always buy a pre-built MCE box from a media centre specialist such as Altech, Enspire or Pioneer Computers. If you bought a pre-built Blu-ray media centre a lot of this tweaking would already be done, plus for the same money you'd get a faster processor, better graphics card, Blu-ray burner, onboard twin-HD tuner, recovery discs and a more attractive case with room for extra hard drives. It would also be easier to upgrade components over time and you could probably expect a better level of customer service from an MCE specialist than from Sony or the discount electrical store that sold you the TP2.

If you're talking value for money, you have to acknowledge that the TP2 comes with a swag of extra apps like Photoshop Elements 6.0, Premiere Elements 4.0, Roxio and 60 day Microsoft Office 2007 trial. There's also plenty of foistware such as Google Toolar, Google Desktop, Picasa and Sonic Stage along with VAIO Movie Story and VAIO Music Box, which replicate many of the features of the MCE interface.

Of course the primary goal of a media centre is stability, which generally means keeping third party software and plugins to a minimum. You shouldn't be using it as you everyday computer for running Office and video editing, you should pretend it's an AV appliance and leave it alone.