Question Upgrade or buy a new laptop?

[dballz972]

I currently have the hp pavillion 15- ec0xxx. It has the AMD Ryzen 5 3550 H processor, 8 GB ram, 1 TB HDD and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card. As of late the laptop has been underperforming and giving me trouble. I was thinking of upgrading RAM and SSD as the laptop has been slow. I was wondering if it was better to upgrade the laptop or to just a buy new one?

 

[Gamefreaknet]

I currently have the hp pavillion 15- ec0xxx. It has the AMD Ryzen 5 3550 H processor, 8 GB ram, 1 TB HDD and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 graphics card. As of late the laptop has been underperforming and giving me trouble. I was thinking of upgrading RAM and SSD as the laptop has been slow. I was wondering if it was better to upgrade the laptop or to just a buy new one?

Depends on a lot... If you want to be on the go a laptop would be ideal for you yes. And also if you have some sort of preference or not over Intel/AMD/Nvidia etc... However assuming you're not on the go much and just want to upgrade... don't upgrade your laptop if its getting old. The mobile GTX 1650 could still play some games well but with a lot of games with the graphics tuned down. For a laptop with an i7 12th gen and 3060/3050ti (or 3070 if you're lucky) that would cost around £1000+ plus unlike desktops:
1: general rule of thumb... laptop variants of parts perform worse due to TDP limits and design
2: a lot of laptops have the "core" parts like the CPU and GPU soldered on so you can't change and/or upgrade parts to keep your PC futureproof
For £1000 you can get a pretty decent desktop build that will outperform a lot of "gaming laptops" out there in price to performance terms.

 

[falcon291]

For gaming, buy a new laptop, increasing RAM or replacing HD would give you a great boost but the fps will not increase.
If you are not gaming with that laptop, increasing the RAM and replacing the HD with a SSD, will be great and enough.

I hate gaming laptops; they are too big to move around and at the same time they are a lot more expensive than desktop computers giving the same performance. If you are into gaming, think about buying a desktop game computer, you will not regret.

 

[Avro Arrow]

Craptops aren't made to be upgraded. The most that you can generally do to them is add RAM. The BIOS in a craptop is also completely locked down to the point that a lot of them won't even accept a faster CPU even if it has the correct socket. These things are even more disposable than brand-in-a-box desktops.

This is why I call them craptops and it's also why I never would allow one to be my only PC. I do have a craptop but it's nothing high-end. I only use it for portability, a craptop's only strength.

 

[geofelt]

What might have happened recently to reduce the performance of your laptop?
Possibly malware or a virus?

If your windows C drive is on a HDD, you can transform the performance by replacing the hdd with a ssd.That is easy enough to do via cloning.

The first rule for ram is to get enough.
When running your apps,
look at task manager/resource monitor/memory tab/hard page fault column.
If you see a hard fault page rate much above zero, you can use more ram.
If you have only one stick of 8gb, I would definitely upgrade to a 2 x 8gb ram configuration.
CPU-Z ram and spd tabs will tell you what you nave.