Buying New Laptop or Upgrading Old One?

[Myronazz]

Hello,

Here is the thing: We are looking to buy a new laptop for really cheap, around £200. There are a couple of laptops here and there for that price, but their specs are not really what you'd call usuable for even Internet Browsing.

In a nutshell, it has these specs:

• CPU: N400 Celeron
• RAM: 2 GB DDR3
• eMMC drive

I mean, the eMMC drive might be a saver, but Windows 10 has grown to be pretty RAM hungry over the years... so this might work for basic things, but have more than 5 tabs open and its going to turn ugly. I know this because we had another laptop in similar spec, running Windows 7 (not even 10) and it was unbearble so I don't even want to imagine what it would be like with Windows 10.

So I was thinking... We have an old Toshiba C660 lying around from the 1st generation of Intel's core processors, it has:

• CPU: i3 350m
• RAM: 1x4GB (Has two slots)
• 80GB HDD

That thing has a CPU socket, so I could buy something like an i7 720QM for like £20 since they are so old, and a SATA SSD for also around £25 and maybe another 4GB DDR3 module. Not only do we spend quite a bit less than £200, it seems like it would be better than that piece of junk Celeron processor. What do you think?

Needless to say, I am not at all expecting any graphical performance out of them. No games or anything, just general but snappy use. Which is something I doubt the N400 can do with 2 gigs of RAM.

I'm also thinking of Hackintoshing it, but that's another topic I'll research later on in line. That would be a nice cheapo Macbook. The Celeron laptop can't do hackintosh since it has freaking BrayTrail Graphics.

 

[ScrewySqrl]

I wouldn't try to update. the laptop will have been designed to barely handle the heat of the i3, and won't handle an i7. and a more than decade old i7 won't be a significant upgrade, anyway.

you'e better off getting a newer design. what sort of budget do you have?

 

[Myronazz]

Oh well, I thought it was worth mentioning.

Our budget is 'Round £200, can push it to £250 or even £300 if we really try. Although that wouldn't be ideal since we dont want to spend crazy amounts on a laptop for Internet, documents and research (lots of tabs open at the same time, something a Celeron can't handle.)

I was thinking of buying something on the used market, and hackintoshing that if the original plan didn't work. Maybe something like a third or fourth gen i5 with a decent amount of RAM and a platform that makes it easier to setup hackintosh. But uh, don't worry about that if you have something specific to suggest in mind. I don't expect people to have hackintosh experience here; it's something for me to research later on.

That said, I never really expected to get anything decent on the new (retail) market, so I was either going to jerry rig that old laptop I have or find something used. Or maybe something else if someone has a better idea.

 

[lga1156_ftw]

c660 supports up to i5-2540M without bios modding , just get latest bios version from manufactor site before upgrade.
Is there any point to have 8gb memory since your windows wont anywy use that much? Max ram size is 8gb but i think 6gb is enough total.

It supports sata2 so you wont get full speed but change should be very noticable still.

If your thinking about anything else than watching youtube or movies and browsing then you need new laptop.

 

[Myronazz]

c660 supports up to i5-2540M without bios modding

Oh okay, thank you for the information. Good to know.

Is there any point to have 8gb memory since your windows wont anyway use that much?

I've tried Windows 10 in many different RAM configurations, and the most recent versions behave best at 8 gigs. It can work at 6 gigs, but it does alot of garbage collection in order to conserve memory for the user. So not only does the user end up with less memory, but all the garbage collection in the background can take a toll on the CPU.

My main computer has eight gigs on it, which is optimal for office work. At idle, it uses about four gigs of memory for the system, so I am only left with about four for myself. So... that said, if you have six gigs, then you will end up with about two gigs for use, or more if Windows does garbage collections (but that's at a CPU cost.) so it works, but is slower and the performance can be quite bad at times.

A lot of people have said this to me over the last year, and I've noticed, in my experience at least, that it's not true anymore. Windows 10's memory needs have changed over the years. Not mentioning that programs themselves have also grown in RAM usage. Four gigabytes is just not optimal anymore for stock Windows 10.