Matte grey and black aren't colours that usually adorn the fun things in life, such as Lamborghini Murciélagos or the cast of Mamma Mia. So who knows why Rock has chosen to wrap its Pegasus range of multimedia/gaming laptops in a two-tone shade of plastic mediocrity. It's a mis-step that may put buyers off from including the 665-T72 on their shortlist.

If first impressions don't mean that much to you, then the specs of the device will make encouraging reading. The Pegasus comes preinstalled with Windows Vista Home Premium. As such, it's a given that the hardware's up to the job of running the flashy OS, complete with the Aero interface.

The Windows Experience Index - an at-a-glance method of rating your PC's power and the software that it can run - verifies this. It comes up with a value of 4.4, which is good since the maximum current score on the most powerful home machines is 5.9.

If you're an early adopter who's looking out for a PC that can run Vista on the move, then you've come to the right place. All this is possible thanks to the sensible combination of the 2GHz Core 2 Duo chip, the powerful GeForce Go 7600 and the capacious hard drive.

Game on

This brings us back to the machine's leisure roots. The 3DMark benchmark test demonstrated that it can handle fast-paced action games of recent years. Note that until patches are made available, you may experience some incompatibility hiccups with Vista. However, owners of the Pegasus will be well placed once DirectX 10 products become available.

It's a bit of a mixed bag on the multimedia front. For example, the superblack glossy screen is a bit of a letdown. Apart from the distracting reflections, our review model had faint white light bleeding at the top and bottom of the display.

Furthermore, watching video on the Pegasus proved frustrating. There's a definite sweet spot where the viewing experience was unparalleled. Yet moving a fraction either side of the spot resulted in a mish-mash of black lowlights and distorted video. The speakers failed to convey any bass, resulting in the dialogue sounding weedy.