Lately I've been feeling mostly smug in an annoying and show-offy kinda way, about the fact that I finally got round to setting up my Dell notebook in the office to act as an extended display.

I've been aware of this feature in Windows XP since it came out in 2001 but, strangely, I never actually got round to trying it. I can't fathom why, it takes barely 3.5 seconds to make it happen.

Anyway, I tried it out last week and I'm quite pleased with the added dimension of another desktop space to play with alongside my regular LCD display.

You don't realise it as such, but if you spend as much time perched in front of a windows desktop as I do, adding another 30% worth of desktop space in this way is like building a large extension to your home. This new virtual space in your life feels odd at first as you work out what uses to put it to. But eventually, your brain gets used to it and before long you'll forget what life was like without it.

When I spent a couple of days on the Microsft campus in Seattle back in 2003, I had a tour of their museum of the future thing where they had various prototype mock-ups and so on, and one of the best things they had was this convex screen (or perhaps concave, depending on whether you are stading in front of it or behind it, I suppose) which had various desktop widgets scrolling across it's panoramic expanse.

Another five years and I'll wager we'll all have extended virtual workspaces. And ironically, we'll probably need to extend our physical spaces to fit them in after all.