Computers really haven’t been selling that well for a few years now, I think and there are several reasons for this: Computing tasks are being pushed down into all sorts of smaller piece of equipment, making it less urgent to update the home PC; current computers are fast enough to do the tasks to which they are assigned right now; people are moving away from desktops and toward more expensive laptops, and more expense means less of an urge to upgrade; and I suspect there is more than a little upgrade fatigue out there.

But hardware builders have been putting together the pieces that will push people to upgrade. The biggest development, I think, is multi-core processors. If your machine has ever been held hostage by a long task — say, ripping a DVD — you can immediately see the advantage of having a processor that can run that task and others without a performance hit. The best (and really, probably only) way to do that is with multiple processing cores. And imagine what a video game might do with multiple processors performing all the hard work

My home Frankenputer has a dual-core AMD processor (I’ve used AMDs for years) that I love; a dual-core and a bunch of memory cure a lot of ills. Now, Intel has rolled out a quad-core processor and AMD appears poised to follow suit. It’s going to be a while before the software exists to take advantage of this hardware, but when it does, the idea of a “home utility” PC that runs games, browses the Web and performs office work all at once is not far-fetched at all.