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All of which brings us pretty much up to date. Intel's processors have become so competent that they've left others in the dust. AMD has attempted to compete, first with its Power Now technology and latterly with its Turion and Turion X2 dual core processors, but it can only lay claim to a tiny fraction of the notebook market.

Even Apple has had to admit defeat, moving many of its notebooks and even desktop machines over to the Intel Core Duo and Core 2 Duo platform. As a result, prices have fallen and its MacBook range is now a real alternative to Windows-based laptops.

More importantly, the success of Intel's Centrino platform has also driven the price of laptops down in the last few years to the point at which a laptop can be bought for as little as a budget PC. If you had predicted that to a certain cynical computer journalist ten years ago, you would have been informed in no uncertain terms of your lunacy and warned of the impending arrival of the men in white coats.

And yet here we are. Laptop owners can now do everything with their machines that they can with a desktop, and they don't have to pay through nose for the privilege, or make the compromises between battery life and performance that they once did.

Let's hope that Intel's next major development, Santa Rosa and its planned successor, Montevina, will continue the trend, but that’s another story...

World peace? Bah – give me the perfect laptop any day.

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