[SOLVED] Time to upgrade the family laptop?!

[NOT_PROVIDED_16]

Hi everyone! I haven't been on here in over a year! This website has seemed to has change quite a bit!

Ok,
So at the start of this year i decided to sell all the old desktops pcs in the house. I owned 2 old Dells from 2006-2010! and a PC i built myself with old parts from 2010
They were still going strong. But they were not being used anymore.

Shortly after I decided to buy a laptop on eBay (Toshiba T130-15F) I put an SSD in there what i had lying around with 3gigs of ram. The laptop works great and i can't complain with the price as it only cost me £21.00 !!!

My question is there any real benefit to buying a brand new laptop? I've been looking at the Lenovo IdeaPad 120S its currently on sale at £129.00 OR a Chromebook?
Is it worth upgrading or am i just wasting my money?

All we need the laptop for is for surfing the web and printing postage labels for buying a selling on ebay.

 

[01swodniW]

If the laptop you currently have is working fine for your needs, I can see no reason to upgrade. But if you do want to upgrade, I don't think that IdeaPad is a good idea, considering it shouldn't perform much better than your current machine.

 

[NOT_PROVIDED_16]

;

If the laptop you currently have is working fine for your needs, I can see no reason to upgrade. But if you do want to upgrade, I don't think that IdeaPad is a good idea, considering it shouldn't perform much better than your current machine.

Thats what i was thinking, i was unsure how much performance wise if there really was a benefit to buying a new budget laptop.

 

[NOT_PROVIDED_16]

Hi everyone! I haven't been on here in over a year! This website has seemed to has change quite a bit!

Ok,
So at the start of this year i decided to sell all the old desktops pcs in the house. I owned 2 old Dells from 2006-2010! and a PC i built myself with old parts from 2010
They were still going strong. But they were not being used anymore.

Shortly after I decided to buy a laptop on eBay (Toshiba T130-15F) I put an SSD in there what i had lying around with 3gigs of ram. The laptop works great and i can't complain with the price as it only cost me £21.00 !!!

My question is there any real benefit to buying a brand new laptop? I've been looking at the Lenovo IdeaPad 120S its currently on sale at £129.00 OR a Chromebook?
Is it worth upgrading or am i just wasting my money?

All we need the laptop for is for surfing the web and printing postage labels for buying a selling on ebay.

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

Considering what you use your current laptop for (and you say "it works great") there would be no point in shelling out for a new one as you would gain no benefits from it's higher spec.

In my opinion it would be better to wait until you actually need a higher-spec laptop (eg to run more demanding applications that you don't currently use).

 

[NOT_PROVIDED_16]

Considering what you use your current laptop for (and you say "it works great") there would be no point in shelling out for a new one as you would gain no benefits from it's higher spec.

In my opinion it would be better to wait until you actually need a higher-spec laptop (eg to run more demanding applications that you don't currently use).
[/QUO

Considering what you use your current laptop for (and you say "it works great") there would be no point in shelling out for a new one as you would gain no benefits from it's higher spec.

In my opinion it would be better to wait until you actually need a higher-spec laptop (eg to run more demanding applications that you don't currently use).

so there would be no performance benefit at all?

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

Your current laptop already has the OS installed on a SSD so Windows wouldn't boot any faster on a new laptop.
But if new laptop has more RAM than your current one, and a more powerful CPU, Windows would feel "snappier" for sure, so if you feel that's worth the cost of a new laptop then go ahead.

All I'm saying is you don't need a new one for the type of work you're using your current laptop for, and you did say "it works great". If your existing laptop is running 64-bit Windows I'd look at adding more RAM to it as 3GB is definitley on the low side these days.

That's just my opinion --- others may disagree of course. Just trying to help you spend your money wisely.

 

[Bulunge]

I'd like to ask a similar question as the OP. More like whether to spend time and money getting a laptop running again.

in 2014 my mum bought an HP Pavillion 15 laptop and right out of the box it was sluggish and generally a bit rubbish but it wasn't an overly expensive machine (from memory about £300) and served its purpose.

Eventually the laptop became so slow as to be basically unusable for anything other than putting on a film or other simple tasks. My mum has replaced the laptop recently (thank you Amazon Prime day) and since it wasn't being used the battery has failed.

I've since found out my sister might be returning home from her time in the States and so the household will need another laptop for her, so what I want to to know is if there is any way I can get the laptop to a reasonable level of usefulness without breaking the bank.

It has a 1.5GHz AMD Quad-Core A4-5000 CPU
4GB of RAM on one stick in one of the two available slots.
and I think a 750GB 5400 rpm HDD.

The upgrades I was considering were:
Upgrading the RAM (I think it can take a max of 8GB since it's running Win 10 64 bit)
Changing the HDD to either a 7200 rpm or maybe even SSD, although the cost of that seems a little prohibitive - also the HDD is buried in the bowels of the machine and I'm not sure I feel okay taking it apart to get at it, so I'd probably have to pay someone to do it.

When I run the task manager on the machine the two stats that concern me are that both the CPU and HDD usage are almost always at peak or near peak capacity, I can't see any specific program or application that is the culprit but it does sometimes settle down to the CPU running at 20-30% and the HDD down to 7%, but then when opening a new program or application it'll ramp back up again.

The question, after that essay is:
Is it worth trying to make this machine usable, or should I whack it on ebay, get what I can for it and see if I can find a decent used machine for what I would have paid to replace the battery and upgrade the machine?

 

[Rdslw]

If the laptop you currently have is working fine for your needs, I can see no reason to upgrade. But if you do want to upgrade, I don't think that IdeaPad is a good idea, considering it shouldn't perform much better than your current machine.

As mentioned, if you see any issues, otherwise its a waste of $.
I had one small 2 in 1 with:
x5-Z8350 (its so weak that it cannot do netflix)
so its a good reason to upgrade.
If its fine, then why bother?

I use 7 year old laptop as my daily. (i5-3210m) I added 16 GB of ram, ssd and its fine for everything except gaming. Once it will fail to do netflix or browsers will lag, it will be replaced.

I will post comparison on 2 cpu's I talked about:
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Atom-x5-Z8350-vs-Intel-Core-i5-3210M/m143924vs2719
feel free to change CPU to yours and compare with others you think about.

 

[NOT_PROVIDED_16]

I'd like to ask a similar question as the OP. More like whether to spend time and money getting a laptop running again.

in 2014 my mum bought an HP Pavillion 15 laptop and right out of the box it was sluggish and generally a bit rubbish but it wasn't an overly expensive machine (from memory about £300) and served its purpose.

Eventually the laptop became so slow as to be basically unusable for anything other than putting on a film or other simple tasks. My mum has replaced the laptop recently (thank you Amazon Prime day) and since it wasn't being used the battery has failed.

I've since found out my sister might be returning home from her time in the States and so the household will need another laptop for her, so what I want to to know is if there is any way I can get the laptop to a reasonable level of usefulness without breaking the bank.

It has a 1.5GHz AMD Quad-Core A4-5000 CPU
4GB of RAM on one stick in one of the two available slots.
and I think a 750GB 5400 rpm HDD.

The upgrades I was considering were:
Upgrading the RAM (I think it can take a max of 8GB since it's running Win 10 64 bit)
Changing the HDD to either a 7200 rpm or maybe even SSD, although the cost of that seems a little prohibitive - also the HDD is buried in the bowels of the machine and I'm not sure I feel okay taking it apart to get at it, so I'd probably have to pay someone to do it.

When I run the task manager on the machine the two stats that concern me are that both the CPU and HDD usage are almost always at peak or near peak capacity, I can't see any specific program or application that is the culprit but it does sometimes settle down to the CPU running at 20-30% and the HDD down to 7%, but then when opening a new program or application it'll ramp back up again.

The question, after that essay is:
Is it worth trying to make this machine usable, or should I whack it on ebay, get what I can for it and see if I can find a decent used machine for what I would have paid to replace the battery and upgrade the machine?

Put an SSD in there and it will be good as new. I put an SSD in my laptop and the difference in speeds is truly unbelievable. You can buy SSDs quite cheep now I've seen them on sale for around £20 for a 240gb.

 

[01swodniW]

I'd like to ask a similar question as the OP. More like whether to spend time and money getting a laptop running again.

in 2014 my mum bought an HP Pavillion 15 laptop and right out of the box it was sluggish and generally a bit rubbish but it wasn't an overly expensive machine (from memory about £300) and served its purpose.

Eventually the laptop became so slow as to be basically unusable for anything other than putting on a film or other simple tasks. My mum has replaced the laptop recently (thank you Amazon Prime day) and since it wasn't being used the battery has failed.

I've since found out my sister might be returning home from her time in the States and so the household will need another laptop for her, so what I want to to know is if there is any way I can get the laptop to a reasonable level of usefulness without breaking the bank.

It has a 1.5GHz AMD Quad-Core A4-5000 CPU
4GB of RAM on one stick in one of the two available slots.
and I think a 750GB 5400 rpm HDD.

The upgrades I was considering were:
Upgrading the RAM (I think it can take a max of 8GB since it's running Win 10 64 bit)
Changing the HDD to either a 7200 rpm or maybe even SSD, although the cost of that seems a little prohibitive - also the HDD is buried in the bowels of the machine and I'm not sure I feel okay taking it apart to get at it, so I'd probably have to pay someone to do it.

When I run the task manager on the machine the two stats that concern me are that both the CPU and HDD usage are almost always at peak or near peak capacity, I can't see any specific program or application that is the culprit but it does sometimes settle down to the CPU running at 20-30% and the HDD down to 7%, but then when opening a new program or application it'll ramp back up again.

The question, after that essay is:
Is it worth trying to make this machine usable, or should I whack it on ebay, get what I can for it and see if I can find a decent used machine for what I would have paid to replace the battery and upgrade the machine?

I have a similar machine and it has always been pretty slow. I am not sure if it is worth upgrading, as the CPU is quite slow. If you really want to you could install an SSD, which would eliminate one of the factors that are slowing down your laptop. I don't live in the UK, but from a quick search you could get a 240GB SSD for about £30. A 4gb stick of laptop RAM isn't too hard to find, and I'm sure you could get one new or used. Whether you would want to fork out the money to someone to install these parts or do it yourself is up to you. Worst case scenario your laptop is still slow and you've spent about £50, so you could keep the SSD or just sell it a bit cheaper.

But personally, I would whack it on Ebay.