brotherhood_of_LAN - 11:26 pm on Oct 25, 2012 (gmt 0)

>heavy lifting

Even then, hosting/cloud can do that and be quite economical.

IMHO desktops for the mainstream and most part just need to be 'fast enough' to get online & handle whatever software you like running on there, which for most people would be some office software and a browser.

Gamers/hardware intensive programs will want something a little more hefty.

I can't think of anything that's CPU/IO intensive that I do on my laptop (which for all intents and purposes could be called a desktop).

SSD seems the way to go as storage is typically the bottleneck.

I'll be upgrading when the laptop starts falling apart.