Hard Drives are in for a very welcome change.

I won't buy new these days Mike as second hand is so much better value and the quality of machines that you get on eBay are really superb now if you are careful in what you purchase.

The other reason is that there is nothing on the market now that can match the user experience of the old generation ThinkPad, up to the xx20 generation i.e. the X220, T420, W520 etc. they had a proper IBM 7 row keyboard layout with real proper keys and the 6 key island at the top right and the arrow keys in the right place at the bottom right and a proper sized large backspace key.

They also had the Trackpoint with 3 real buttons and a Touchpad with 2 real buttons, and the ThinkLight which is just a brilliant feature, and then they progressively threw it all away over the next 3 generations.

Programmers, scientists, engineer's, professional touch typists, the people that use these machines day in day out for real work bought ThinkPad's not because they looked nice or were the fastest laptops in the world they bought them because they never changed, they got the design right 20 years ago and they never freaking changed it, a little black Bento Box with a keyboard and ergonomics to die for.

Ergonomically the ThinkPad was perfect, particularly the keyboard which was perfect for people that had to switch from desktop to laptop and back, muscle memory worked the same way on a desktop and a laptop keyboard it was perfect, the feel was great too and these machines were built like tanks, you could drop them from a great height and they would still work, they were modular and could be serviced, they were great machines, you could rely on a ThinkPad, but no longer.

Now, since the terms of sale from IBM have expired, they have been fiddling with the design year after year and completely missing the point, we don't want the cute Apple laptop that makes us constantly make mistakes when typing, we don't want gigantic Trackpads without real buttons that accidentally moves the mouse when we don't want to move it, we don't really care about what it looks like, all they are doing is trying to turn the ThinkPad into a cheap bad copy of an Apple Mac and it's sh*t and it stinks.

And you know what's worse, there is no alternative now!

No one else is left in the market place that makes a laptop with a 7 row keyboard or with a perfectly balanced TrackPoint combined with real buttons, or with any of things that made the ThinkPad a truly great machine for work.

So I will never buy another ThinkPad that is not second hand and no matter how much we complain they will never make a classic ThinkPad ever again, so once I get the W520 (and maybe the X230 that I said I could just about live with the crappy keyboard on) that will be it and I will have to hope that it lasts for a long long, long long time

Certainly Mike!

Yes you absolutely need an SSD

On a good one with good firmware and high quality manufacturing tolerances, your data will outlast any spinning disk, not only that but by their very nature they don't leave deleted data lying around so they are far more secure than spinning disks, also they have impact tolerance vastly higher than any spinning disk, and you can move and shake your laptop as much as you want it won't damage the drive, laptops used to have a sensor that auto parked the drive heads if you lifted the laptop, no need anymore.

And of course there are those 8 second boot times and instantly open applications, Spinny things are dead

One more important point to bear in mind when you consider a 2.5 inch SSD is the drive height, some laptops demand 7mm height but many SSD drives will only be available in 9.5mm height, so check the specs carefully.

This also applies to very large capacity standard 2.5 inch drives, these also come in several heights, it is very hard to find a slim 7mm ultra high capacity 1TB disk, they do exist but they don't stand out that well unless you read the detailed specs on whatever site is selling the drive, this matters because many ultrabook laptops require 7mm height drives and the slim ones are always more expensive

Basically the higher the drive capacity the harder it is to find a slim or cheap version.

Actually performance requirements have not really increased since Vista and 7, while bigger, was cleaner and faster, 8 is pretty much the same, I'm expecting 10 to be a very good version as it is really an odd numbered version (it should have been 9) and odd numbers have historically been good.

The only thing wrong with 8 was Ballmer's insistence on forcing a desktop to work the same as a tablet, 10 will fix all that and bring some compelling new features.

Win 8 was such a disaster that they are trying to put as much distance from it as they can so they skipped 9 and went straight to 10