Time for a new workstation...

[Sysman]

My trusty old ASUS M50 Laptop is a Core2Duo 2.5GHz, 4GB ram, and i upgraded to SSD.
its a few years old now, but still going strong. As you say, the SSD upgrade was very noticeable!!

It has a "windows Experience Index" of 4.8, because its let down by its graphics card, but the full score are below...

Processor: 6.1
Memory: 6.1
Graphics: 4.8
Gaming Graphics: 5.9
Primary hard disk: 7.8

How do newer machines compare??

18 month old dual core AMD with "shared memory" on board graphics chip, 2.9 GHz:

Processor: 6.4
Memory: 5.9
Graphics: 3.7
Gaming Graphics: 3.5
Primary hard disk: 5.9

Since the ratings only go up to 7.9, your disk is at near as makes no difference the max possible. I think it's unlikely that 5.9 (my SATA disk) versus 7.9 (your SSD) gives a meaningful comparison in terms of work getting done.

I don't really give a monkeys about the graphics. I don't use this system for gaming and can do nicely without all the Aero eye candy.

[TheFaQQer]

Happy either way, budget = whatever it costs to get a good machine, but tigth wad side of my brain would limit to about 600quid (without monitors)

I'd play about with the configuration tool on pcspecialist and see what they would build one for - then see what else there is out there.

[Platypus]

Well I've just upgraded my trusty old HP Pavilion. I bought a system from Scan after seeing several recommendations on here.

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2700K CPU @ 3.50GHz 7.8
Memory (RAM) 16.0 GB 7.8
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 7.6
Gaming graphics 7.6
Primary hard disk 7.9

Overall 7.6

It shipped overclocked, but after a couple of crashes already (in two days) I've reverted to the non-overclocked BIOS settings and touch wood all seems well now. After this experience I'd never go overclocked again.

It was either this or a Dell Precision Workstation. I went for the Scan primarily because there was an SSD option.

And I went for tons of memory so I could run some VMs. Although no doubt someone will say "should have got a Xeon if using VMs". Oh well.