“It’s not funny,” she said, having held the laptop for 30 seconds as I fiddled with the camera, “this laptop is heavy.”

That’s also undeniably true, but then the Satellite P500 wasn’t built to be carried between home and office. This is a machine designed to entertain, and Toshiba packs in all the hi-tech goodies you can think of to make it a pleasure to use.

Heading the list of entertainment partners is Blu-ray, which is included in the top-end model. It’s a writer as well as a reader, but sadly I couldn’t test it on the stand as the mix of early drivers and software wasn’t working (the P500 isn’t due for release until October at the earliest).

I could test the rather beautiful looking Harman Kardon speakers, which on first listen – at a busy stand, note – lived up to Toshiba’s description as “delicious”. You could pick out the detail and the bass, and they didn’t distort at volume either.

The 18.4in screen is equally delicious, as it should be, with the 1,680 x 945 screen I was admiring a pleasure to gaze upon. The multi-touch keyboard also worked well enough within what appears to be quite a basic remit of zooming in and out, though I’ll hold judgement on both this and the keyboard before using them in anger.

We covered the rest of the known spec in our news story about the P500, but suffice to say that whatever you decide to use this laptop for – gaming, video editing, photo editing – a combination of Intel’s fastest laptop processors and Nvidia’s fastest graphics mean it should perform with some aplomb.

Add in support for up to 8GB of RAM and a terabyte of storage, courtesy of two hard disk bays, and the P500 lives up to its desktop replacement description. We look forward to getting it into our Labs for a full test as soon as possible!

To most, the recent format war was boring, unnecessary and hyped out of all proportion to the number of people who actually cared. DVDs were fine, no one even had HD tellies, and the thought of shelling out what were then £400+ prices for what could soon become obsolete understandably put off, well, everybody except the movie studios.

When the PlayStation 3 arrived with a Blu-ray drive there was only going to be one winner, and HD-DVD duly succumbed as the studios deserted it. With HDTV sales booming, what should have been the turning point for Blu-ray adoption ended up making practically no difference to the take-up rate, and while the studios are so quick to make excuses that’s entirely their own fault.

You could go into the lack of advertising until relatively recently, or the high cost of the players; but the biggest mistake the studios made was to break the golden rule of launching a new format: they didn’t bother releasing any good films.

This seemingly obvious rule didn’t enter Sony’s thinking as the first launch titles were announced back in 2006. Hitch, 50 First Dates, House of Flying Daggers, UnderWorld Evolution, xXx, The Fifth Element – any of those get you itching to stump up £400? Nope, me neither.

With these and the next few rounds of releases, Sony seemed most intent on releasing films several years old, and getting the family market interested – which was never going to work at early adopter prices. Most of the first wave of titles were just rushed, feature-free HD conversions of older films, which isn’t likely to tempt people who already own the DVD, especially as upscaling DVD players are so common now.

I bring all of this up because Blu-ray has at last been growing of late, with Iron Man and several other films garnering strong, if not stellar, sales figures. It’s been getting closer to the tipping point, just a nudge away from entering the mainstream consciousness – but it still needed its one killer app.

Then this week The Dark Knight was released on Blu-ray. It’s a film so perfectly suited to HD that its release was a no-brainer, but I think even Sony has been surprised by how well it’s sold: a hefty 1.7m Blu-ray copies, or up to 30% of the all-formats total - with 600,000 on the first day alone.

It’s no great surprise that this well-made Blu-ray of an absolutely stunning film - complete with iMax segments for the biggest scenes – has smashed the records to become the format’s first must-have title. What is surprising is that it’s taken the studios so long to realise we’re not mugs, we won’t just shell out money for whatever tat they put out there because we don’t know any better.

Far from being reluctant to adopt because we’re idiots who don’t know anything about technology, as the studios’ approach until recently has implied, it seems the public has just been waiting politely for the big studios to, you know, take the time and effort to make a good film into a good Blu-ray package. Hardly rocket science, Sony.

But the one problem online retailers have is capturing the browsing shopper. With only a home page to compete with the highly visible displays in most shop windows, it’s not easy to simply wander around an online store and spot something you may not have been looking for.

Step forward Amazon WindowShop.

Like Apple’s Cover Flow after a couple of Pro Plus and six cans of Red Bull, it’s basically a huge grid of the latest and best offerings from Amazon, easily navigated with the cursor keys. Flick through the bestselling DVDs of the week, the artists Amazon thinks you should hear and editors picks of the latest novels.

It’s all very slick, but all seems a little pointless – until you actually see what Amazon is offering you. Press Space to zoom in on an item and the appeal becomes clear: audio extracts from books and CDs, video clips and trailers for DVDs and games, including extras or interviews and anything else that may accompany a particular product. And if that’s not hypnotic enough, you can buy anything you like right there and then.

Our only real concern is in the name – WindowShop. Could it be that, as with most branches of Borders and Waterstones these days, it just further narrows most people’s taste range to the few heavily-marketed products that are waved before their eyes as they walk through the door?

I’d like to believe it heralds a new generation of web shops, but I can’t help thinking it’ll simply be used to sell more copies of High School Musical to people who really should be buying The Wire.