Question buying a cheap laptop/advice

krissyneillie1

Distinguished
Jul 10, 2012
21
0
18,510
hello, i am looking for some advice, my grandmother has an old toshiba satellite c850d and its very very slow, it has an AMD E1-1200 and ive came to the conclusion no matter what i try i will not make this laptop run fast or smooth due to that awful CPU, it already had an ssd and 4gb of ram, adding another 4 i had lying around made no difference so there doesnt seem to be any chance of giving this laptop a new lease of life

i need some advice on buying an older laptop that has the ability to run well with an ssd upgrade and extra ram thrown in, i can recycle the ssd from this laptop and use the ram sticks if required, ideally id like something that has an i5 or similar as i know my t430 runs very well with this CPU, i could just look for a t430 but the problem is the screen, her toshiba had a much nicer display so if i could get something with a decent enough screen and an intel cpu i could look around and pick something up cheap then upgrade it with what i already have and i believe i should be able to provide her with something that isnt lag lag lag

Many thanks
 
U look for screen.

Don't buy anything older than Haswell or equivalent 2014?

Old laptop means you have to budget for a new battery highly likely.

Ram will probably be not transferrable, they've been upgraded from ddr2, ddr3, ddr4 etc and NOT backward compatible.
 

krissyneillie1

Distinguished
Jul 10, 2012
21
0
18,510
sorry i guess i should of specified a budget, i don't really have one to be honest, if i had a couple of choices i guess i could go from there and see what they are usually selling for on Facebook, eBay etc, i would be more looking to find a bargain, if i had to state a budget it would be something around £150-£200, im basically comparing this Toshiba against my t430 which would be from around 2012?, its night and day the difference between the two and the performance im getting from my t430 is better than a desktop i previously built

what i could maybe do is let her have a look at my t430 and if she thinks the screen is good enough i could pick one of those up, i know they can go for cheap and they're solid performers with little money thrown in