With increasing numbers of people buying laptops instead of desktops, this has got to impact the PC gaming industry.

Laptops have traditionally had inferior graphics capability, not to mention general CPU and memory capability.

However the biggest problem has been the laggardly way in which many of the laptop manufacturers treat driver updates for laptops. Several times I've tried to find new drivers to squeeze some more performance, and then been bounced back and forth between chipset makers who refuse to publish drivers (go the laptop maker) and laptop makers who can't be bothered to keep their websites current with new drivers for older models.

Some of the current crop of online games such as Eve-Online and Second Life are starting to get grief or fail to run on my Acer Inspire 1800, which was a pricey high-power model a couple of years ago. If even high-end devices are treated as obsolete after such a short time, a higher population of laptops is going to make game designers think again about how far they can push the hardware.

But then, if that means they spend more effort on gameplay than on pretty gloss, I would count that a win.