One IT Manager has had enough, though, and taken the matter into this own hands by creating the Bustadrive, a machine that uses a powerful “hydraulic punch” to physically deform a hard disk, rendering it virtually unreadable.

The Bustadrive is a product born out of the many frustrations of Ross Waterton, who spent “years decommissioning PCs” and handing hard disks over to destruction companies in a “readable state” but only being given a certificate to let him know that his disks had been destroyed and the data on them hadn’t been accessed – but that wasn’t enough for Waterton, who would have preferred a more water-tight solution.

Waterton built the prototype to use with his own firm’s hard disks but also lent it to friends within the industry – “who all suggested that [Waterton] manufacture and sell the unit”, especially when competing hard disk crushers were “expensive in comparison” to the Bustadrive.

Opinions were mixed when the device arrived in the PC Pro office, though – while I loved the machine and could see exactly where Waterton was coming from, other members of the team doubted that the bent platters of our pair of test disks were actually unreadable. To verify Waterton’s claims, we contacted data destruction companies to get their take on the Bustadrive.

Richard A. Tanfield-Johnson, from ITGreen Computer Recycling, said that “simply chopping the platter in half wouldn’t remove the data” and confirmed that it could be recovered – but the costs of retrieving any remaining information “would be prohibitive”. That’s because you’d need “something along the lines of an electron scanning microscope” to read the data from the remains of the platter – and those currently sell second-hand for at least £40,000.

Tanfield-Johnson also confirmed that, once you’d cracked open a hard disk to extract the platters within, recovering any data would become even more difficult, because you’d need “the same model and make of [circuit] board” to access each track of data on the disk. So, unless you’re willing to spend tens of thousands of pounds, it looks like your data is safe.

Andrew Speedie, a security controller for Secure IT Disposals Limited, concurred, and explained that there are two ways to generally recover data from hard disks – keyboard recovery and laboratory recovery.

Keyboard recovery is only effective when the disk is “mechanically undamaged” and the disk can be plugged into a PC and software can recover the data – and the Bustadrive certainly doesn’t leave disks mechanically undamaged.

Laboratory recovery, meanwhile, “requires specialist equipment” to read disk platters and sometimes has to be conducted by hand, which can take a huge amount of time “depending on the level of damage”. It’s fair to say that laboratory recovery will be beyond the scope and budgets of those looking to recover data from the average hard disk, with Speedie unable to give names of the specialist organisations who can perform such tasks.

The Bustadrive, then, looks like it’ll thwart all but the wealthiest and most determined of hard disk hackers – and, costing just £200 to buy and with a £75 hiring option being considered, it’s far cheaper than both competing products and other services that offer to shred, crush and destroy hard disks. If you destroy a decent number of disks then the Bustadrive could pay for itself within weeks.

Waterton claims that if you invest in the Bustadrive it’ll become “as essential as a screwdriver” – so, if you’d like more information on this unique product and would like to find out more, visit Bustadrive’s website.

Within minutes, people were merrily tweeting in, trying to out-do one another with stories of old hardware that was still running perfectly, many years after it should have been rightfully retired to a landfill site in China.

@djbennett999 showed his hand early, claiming his dad still uses a Windows 98 PC with Internet Explorer 6.  He was, frankly, going all in with nothing stronger than a 2 and a 3. No fewer than 37 people arrived at the PC Pro website yesterday with a Windows 98 PC. Seven were still running Windows 95, while 10 diehards darkened our door with a Windows 3.x system. Sorry, @djbennett999, you’re playing with the big boys now.

@graphiclunarkid actually had a hand worth playing. “My father still runs SuperCalc 5 and WordPerfect 5 in DOS boxes, backed up to floppy disk,” he boasted, before pulling an Ace out of his sleeve. “And his A3 dot-matrix printer is 25 yrs old!”.

Not bad. But @sebtoast wasn’t about to let a kid, albeit a graphiclunarkid, walk away with the pot. “I worked at a company that would service IBM systems like the 5362,” he said, providing a link to a website to prove he wasn’t just making this stuff up. “There is a picture of its HDD, which if my memory is correct, weighs 75-100 pounds,” he added in a follow-up tweet. Pah, that’s nothing pal. We’ve got a flash drive that costs £650!

But just as we were about to shuffle the chips in @sebtoast’s direction, @heybatesy suddenly decided to slap his cards on the table. “My father-in-law still has a number of control systems for grain silos in farms across the east, still in use, controlled by VIC-20’s,” he harrumphed. “He would also like to know if anybody is available for some VIC-20 recompiling work – he has the code printouts!”

Thirty-year-old VIC-20s as the backbone of British agriculture? No wonder the industry’s in ruins.

But before we take off our shirt and hand it to the son-in-law of a Commodore-obsessed farmer, we thought we’d open up the debate to the PC Pro blog. Do you know of anything older than @heybatesy’s VIC-20 still in active service? Glory awaits.

You want the short summary? It works. And how: the machine boots in a shade over 4 seconds.

The detail is where the devil lives, of course. This wasn’t a full test, by any means – i got a recommendation from a mate and thought the risk worth taking: I wanted to extend the life of the trusty MacBook but if it turned out the whole idea was a non-starter I could always use the SSD in a more mainstream laptop, and I wanted to see if the claimed advances in flash architecture really did make the whole concept more usable. Well, that and a conversation with the guys at Overclockers who instantly categorised all the cheaper options by a four-letter word rhyming with “trap”. But then, vendors with new expensive things to sell often do that…

Anyway, the details are varied but none are that unpleasant. Getting inside a MacBook Pro is not what I would call easy: there’s three different lengths of screw, two different heads (one a Torx T6 – not often found) and a couple of stages where you find yourself levering away at a bit of bendy metal alloy, grimacing like mad waiting for the loud CRACK. One type of CRACK indicates the right bits have sprung loose; the other indicates that the touchpad might not work again.

The only action I had to take which was peculiar to my choice of SSD replacement unit, and my use of the MacBook, was in reformatting the SSD. As delivered, it’s an NTFS/MBR single partition. For the Mac I needed 2 HFS+ partitions and a GUID based partition table. Changing over a storage device is easy in theory: click on the right bits of the Disk Utility in OSX and the job’s done. In practice, doing it to a device which is really a RAID0 array internally, arbitrated by its own onboard processor, is a little bit more nerve-wracking.

But you’re reading these words so you know it worked. For Apple people, the procedure I used was to change the MacBook’s startup volume to an external bootable firewire drive that has Leopard Server on it. Then I used SuperDuper to back up the boot volume to the spare space on the external drive, did the hardware swap, SuperDuper’ed the boot partition back to the SSD, and then changed startup disk back to the internal volume again.

Part of the reason why this isn’t the basis for a whole article in the mag is that, as with our infamous printer-ink sunlight fade test, the first week of use is no guide to later weeks. What’s more, there’s a huge variability in the nature, quality, performance and even life-cycle of Flash storage – the fact that any SSD looks like a disk volume is not because they are architected that way, but rather because there’s a storage processor flipping your bits around like billy-o behind the scenes, while trying to tell you that there’s nothing to see.

So I’m going to hold on my final verdict, and give only an interim thumbs up. Battery life is better by about 30% (though the battery use meter has gone nuts, so that’s only my estimate). The palm-rest with the SSD under it is a bit warmer than it was with a hard drive. Overall performance is massively faster, and I suppose theoretically, drop resistance is hugely better too. Though I’m not testing that!

Jumping killer whales and pico blues

Sanyo’s HD2000 pistol-grip camcorder has a special trick – it can record 1080p video at 60fps, and can even reach 600fps for those Planet Earth-style animal action shots if you don’t mind sub-YouTube resolutions. Its video quality may not quite reach excellence but its all-in-one ability to take good video and stills makes it a strong choice at a good price.

Another strong choice, but at a more premium price, was the superb LaCie 324 monitor. The 24in panel displays 92% of the NTSC gamut, and during our tests it had cooing crowds gathered around it as the ultimate endorsement. Bringing images alive in a way standard monitors just can’t match, it earned a deserved recommendation for professionals.

Unfortunately, Dell’s first pico-projector, the M109S, was a bit of a dud in comparison, with focus issues, poor performance in all but the darkest rooms and fiddly controls driving our reviews editor to despair during testing. The format is in its infancy but it’ll have to get better before we dive in.

The bargain PC and the psychic mouse

Novatech sent us the ION, a PC with a difference: a full system with a 17in widescreen TFT, keyboard and mouse for an incredible £234 plus VAT - almost cheap enough to squeeze into our £250 challenge. True, it’s Atom-based so it won’t do everything, but it’s hard to find fault in a system that offers so much for so little.

By contrast, Fujitsu sent us a mouse with an RRP of £299. The culprit is the PalmSecure technology inside it, which uses infra-red to read the unique pattern of the veins in your palm. It’s undoubtedly fascinating to use, and it’s claimed to be more secure than fingerprint technology, but Fujitsu will need to improve the accompanying software before we’d consider breaking the bank fro a palm reader.

On the laptop side of things we saw Lenovo’s ThinkPad W500, a professional machine that occupies a unique niche with its high-resolution screen and ISV workstation certification. It’s impressive, but we’re not convinced it’s quite worth the price.

Best of the rest

We also saw Belkin’s Powerline AV Starter Kit, which finally managed to add some style to a market that’s traditionally been function-over-form. The Xerox Phaser 6280 failed to impress our business reviewer, D-Link’s DGS-1248T ’eco-switch’ fared a little better, but the Vivotek IP7142 IP camera topped them both by being more capable of withstanding the British weather than the rest of us managed this week.

Plug in a supported media player, digital camera, mobile phone or printer, and you’re presented with the Device Stage screen, which allows you to manage tasks specifically tailored to that very model.

Microsoft is essentially handing control of the Device Stage screen to the hardware manufacturers, allowing them to embed links to their online services and client software. A printer manufacturer, for example, might include a direct link to buy new ink cartridges for that specific printer from their website, or a link to a PDF of the device’s manual.

Phone manufacturers could include a facility to record your own ringtone, synchronise contacts, or perform specific tasks using their dedicated PC software.

On the one hand, it’s a perfect opportunity to make life easier for consumers, by opening their eyes to features and services that apply to their particular model. On the other, it could be used as little more than a cheap form of advertising, with manufacturers attempting to lock consumers into their own proprietary software and services.

It awaits to be seen how enthusiastically manufacturers will take to Device Stage, but this is definitely one we’ll monitor carefully.

I loaded up Steam for the first time in a while last night and was promptly asked to participate in Valve’s ongoing hardware survey. I’ve done this before, and the results are always fascinating, so I jumped right in. A few clicks later, and a quick scan of my cobbled-together PC, and I got to see the breakdown of nearly 1.8million gamers’ systems – with some surprises.

Just 41% of polled users have made the much-needed step to a dual or quad-core processor – the norm in pretty much all new PC systems sold today – and 38% have shelled out on 2GB or more of RAM. Assuming a correllation between the two, that leaves a huge proportion of PC players who are still trundling along on 1GB of RAM or less and a single-core CPU.

Monitors are also an interesting point. Despite the fact that we almost never review them any more, and few manufacturers are even pushing new models today, a startling 75% of polled users are still playing on 4:3 monitors. Of those that have moved to widescreen, nearly 35% have opted for screens sized 24in or larger, while nearly 70% are at 20in or larger – if you’re going to upgrade, you may as well aim big.

The graphics card section is out of date, with no entries for ATI’s HD cards or Nvidia’s 9-series or faster, so can be ignored, but there are still more interesting stats to be gleaned from the survey:

• Intel leads AMD roughly 60-40
• An awful lot of people don’t upgrade their graphics drivers
• 1,396 polled gamers have less than 10GB of total hard disk space in their PC
• Nearly 3% of polled users still don’t have a DVD drive
• 8,105 Steam users speak a language called ‘Simplified Chinese’

And then there’s the old Vista issue. How many gamers do you think have upgraded to Microsoft’s flagship – with DirectX 10 it’s surely a gamer’s paradise, right? Wrong. Of the 1.8million Steam users polled, more than 80% are still running trusty old Windows XP. Ouch.

Admittedly, this Steam survey has been running for nearly a year now, and some of the categories and entries could certainly do with updating and starting afresh, but as a snapshot of a community made up almost entirely of gaming PC users it’s fascinating.

Journalists like us can sometimes get carried away in the constant hunt for bigger, faster, better, forgetting the fact that the vast majority of users don’t want to spend money on their PCs every five minutes, and that for many, running Crysis at Low settings is good enough to get enjoyment out of it (strange people).

But mostly a survey like this just highlights the problem that will always exist for PC and component manufacturers: that consumer inertia is just as powerful as technology in determining their bottom lines.