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I was in a conference call a few weeks back in which Intel's Pat Gelsinger outlined his vision for the future of computing. This man was the lead architect of the 486 processor, so he certainly knows what he's talking about.

It was a disappointing sort of a vision he laid out, though. With palpable excitement in his voice, he claimed that in the future we'll have "an emerging of the embedded computing experience" (no argument from me there); that the internet will be merged into "the infrastructure of everything we do" (yep, still with you Pat) affecting "every modality of life, seven by 24" (a little flowery but hanging on); and that (big build up here!) we'll eventually have "smart power grids where you're able to manage your thermostats".

Sorry, what?

He actually did say that. He said that we'd have smart power grids where we were able to manage our thermostats. I can picture the coming Utopia even now. "Darling, shall we eat out tonight? Perhaps take in a show, go for a stroll by the lake, then bask in the magnificent orange warmth of the setting sun as it sinks behind the forest canopy? Oooh, or maybe we should just stay in and fiddle with the heating."

Obviously, Gelsinger was speaking more or less without a script, and coming up with stunning examples of things in mid-sentence is never easy. And I'm the last person in the world who's going to start knocking people for inventing things with no immediate use. When the laser was invented in 1960, everyone thought they were really super, but no-one had a clue what to do with

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them except start fitting them to spaceships in science-fiction novels. Now there's one in every optical drive on the planet.

And I honestly can see that at some point there will be some use for everything being internet-connected. I would have loved to have been reminded by my fridge, while wandering around Waitrose yesterday, that I didn't need to buy that pizza because I already had one I'd bought on Monday. And admittedly, every now and then, I'd like to be able to switch the oven on before I get home so it's pre-heated for the aforementioned pizza to go straight in as soon as I arrive. That would definitely qualify as Quite Nice, but it's hardly the stuff of zeitgeist-altering seismic shifts, is it?

So what about the other end of the scale: the high-end, high-performance billion-transistor CPUs just around the corner? Well, Gelsinger talked a bit about new forms of search, and the idea of being able to search across video and audio, essentially expanding search terms from text to multimedia. Interesting? Yes. Exciting? Not really.

I have it on very good authority that Intel's Nehalem processors will run somewhere in the region of 20% faster than current quad-core parts. And they'll effectively have eight cores, thanks to a revamped version of Hyper-Threading that might even work satisfactorily this time around (the old version, making its first appearance in Pentium 4 processors, made more than a few applications run more slowly). Meanwhile, the Windows XP PC in my living room - a five-year old Hush media system with 256MB RAM and a 933MHz VIA C3 processor - continues to do fine playing my music, letting me check my emails and the odd website, and I have no reason to upgrade it.

In fact, I have no reason to upgrade any of my PCs, from my office desktop to my laptop to my living-room media system to the Core 2 Quad beast sitting (mostly unused) in my study. This has never happened to me before, and it's left me feeling a little bit unsettled. It's like some kind of mid-life crisis: am I too old and boring to want a faster PC? I don't think I am. It's just - and I almost hate myself for saying this - there's no need for one.