Whatever you think of Bill Gates, he dreamt big. And one way or another his dream of putting a PC on in every home and on every desk came true. Personal Computers are everywhere. We all use at least one. Several projects like the One Laptop Per Child program seek to make sure everyone on Earth has access to one.

The PC industry is in trouble now though. The thing is, for most of us, bottom of the line PCs are more than good enough for what they want to do. So ho do the PC manufacturers convince people they need to upgrade their home machine or employers to upgrade those of their employees?

PCs today do everything we want them to do with a little extra to spare. They run office, they run Internet browsers. They pretty much run well enough any kind of software that we want them to. Except for things like hardcore gaming and video editing, which are quite specialist.

Disk space may be problem. But this can be fixed quite easily by using an external hard drive. USB2 is speedy enough for most of us to transfer data.

For example my laptop is 5 years old and does everything I need when I am on the move. It is small, light and tough (lord knows I've given it some rough treatment), it also runs XP and lets me do all the Internet browsing, office document editing and it also plays DVDs.

So what now for the PC industry? Trends have already shown a few things :

* Quieter PCs using less power
* Bigger, flatter screens
* Very small PCs, like the Asus Eee
* Designer or customizable like the Lamborghini laptop

Companies like Oracle and Google are trying to move computing online, so if they succeed hardware will become even less of an issue. So where will Personal Computers go from here?

Tags: Mac, DHCP, TCP/IP