Whenever you are handed a notebook with a price tag of two-and-a-half grand (and that's excluding VAT, by the way), you have a right to expect something pretty special. After all, you can get a fairly decent portable for £1,000 (ex. VAT) nowadays, so you could argue that Sony's £2,554 VAIO PCG-GRX616SP should be 2.5 times as good as a 'fairly decent' notebook to justify its price. Obviously, it's going to have its work cut out.