New laptop or upgrade existing?

[Piff]

We have an ageing Acer Aspire 7736G which gets minimal use, but is an essential part of the home IT kit.
The battery has been replaced in the past but is dead again so it's always linked to the mains. It was upgraded to Win 10 but because of minimal use has not been getting upgrades.
Upgrades now installed so it is now behaving a little better.
It has a 320gb hard disc, 4 gb ram, intel core 2 duo P7450 processor & 17.3" screen.
It is mainly used for photo storage/display, internet browsing and MS word/excel.

Thinking of upgrading and the possibilities are to bin it and buy a new one. Or, buy a new battery (around £30) and a new SSD hard disc, which 240/250gb would probably be adequate (around £55/£60)

Thoughts please..............................

 

[400ixl]

If it does the job just replace the battery. You can probably clear up some disk space by deleting the Win10 upgrade files as well.

 

[DSM10000]

The charger should be "intelligent" and not keep charging when the battery is at full capacity regardless of keeping it plugged in, is it the original charger?

Why buy more storage? Is the current HDD full? Cloud storage may be a better solution. Doubling the memory or greater if possible would be a cheap upgrade.

 

[400ixl]

That model only takes 4Gb RAM unfortunately from what I can see.

 

[Rich H]

If you use cloud storage or a portable hard drive then you don't need to worry as much about the laptop because you will still have access to the photos.

 

[Flyinspanner]

Get a solid state drive? You can plug it into any future pc/laptop.
I’ve got 1TB drive which was fairly cheap.

 

[rockits]

Sorry to say bin it. I normally am a big advocate of keeping but no point spending on battery & SSD on this one as something else is likely to go at some point. Better off taking the money you would spend on battery & SSD to put towards new machine. You can get a decent new machine with SSD for just over 300 quid.

 

[fabes]

Less than that.. .

I recently bought an HP 14inch laptop with AMD 1.9 quad core, 8gb, 120gb SSD and W10 along with 1year warranty from a MS certified reseller, local to me.

Newandusedlaptops4u on ebay

Have a look

 

[fabes]

Item number 232369265997 was the one I bought

Practically unmarked, screen is perfect
And battery is good for well over 2.5 hours so far

And our screen res is better than they list on the spec ( 1600x900) which was a nice bonus

 

[optimusprime]

Piff put FireFox on on it and see it go go

 

[Piff]

Have got firefox and chrome for browsers.
Existing HDD is 320GB and is just over half full. Thinking is for SSD that it would speed the machine up for relatively low cost as more RAM can't be added.
Charger is the original one, current (dead) battery is a copy part.

 

[Piff]

Item number 232369265997 was the one I bought

Practically unmarked, screen is perfect
And battery is good for well over 2.5 hours so far

And our screen res is better than they list on the spec ( 1600x900) which was a nice bonus

Price of that looks good

 

[grober]

Have got firefox and chrome for browsers.
Existing HDD is 320GB and is just over half full. Thinking is for SSD that it would speed the machine up for relatively low cost as more RAM can't be added.
Charger is the original one, current (dead) battery is a copy part.

I went the SSD route a while back on an old computer running windows 7 and I have to say it didn't speed things up much. If you are running an application which constantly requires disc access then maybe, but its more likely your operating system ,processor clock speed and memory that prove to be the bottleneck. Use your Windows task manager or whatever passes for it in Win10 to check all the invisible processes idling in the background taking up valuable memory. I would go for a hardware thats more "contemporary" with your operating system.

 

[Piff]

"contemporary" ?
Do you mean a machine built to run Win 10 rather than one which has been upgraded from Win 7?

 

[John]

I use an 8 year old Asus 15.6" laptop with an Intel Core 2 Duo as my home-based laptop for work (it basically stays at home and I use it if I need to work from home).

I upgraded it to a Kingston 240GB SSD a year or two ago (£60) and it flies for everything I need it for (web browsing, RDP, Office documents etc.).

The main reason for doing this was so that if the unit has been off for a couple of weeks or more, it will sail through the Windows updates fast and be ready to use in no time at all.

I started again on the new drive to ensure it could be as fast as it needs to be (you can download the media from Microsoft to reinstall - you will have digital entitlement logged against your machine to be able to re-activate).

If you have never wiped and started again, than doing this plus upgrading to an SSD will make a huge difference.

If it dies, you can always take the SSD out and use it in a newer machine (which you would buy with a mechanical to save money over a pre-installed SSD).

Doing what you are doing, unless you open lots and lots of Chrome tabs, 4GB will be fine.

The battery is fooked but I never take it anywhere and run it off the mains - so I didn't bother wasting money replacing it (even though I would not be paying for it anyway).

I'm a great advocate of using existing kit where I believe it makes sense to do so.

Better for the environment too.

So you can guess what my advice would be!

 

[grober]

"contemporary" ?
Do you mean a machine built to run Win 10 rather than one which has been upgraded from Win 7?

Yep I get the impression that the folks writing the software/operating systems tend to write it to make the best use of the latest available hardware. [ a form of future proofing] Of course its backwards compatible but runs slower for that reason. Bit like running a low compression N/A engine on high octane fuel-it will run but you won't get the performance its capable of delivering.

 

[sturgeon]

I favour SSD too. That way you have a complete backup in the form of your old HD and as John says , you can transplant your SSD into a new machine if the existing one fails. What else is likely to go wrong though?

 

[Dryce]

Yep I get the impression that the folks writing the software/operating systems tend to write it to make the best use of the latest available hardware.

This is generally true of most software going back in time to old mainframes.

Basically you give the average programmer the idea that they have more memory and more CPU cycles to play with and they consume them - sometimes not very productively. And over time the minimum hardware spec rises.

And these days it's complicated by people using browsers which pull in large amounts of data amnd transient code from external sites. So rendering a web page can suck the oxygen from your system because the web page desigers and publisher are being profligate.

 

[Piff]

If going for a new SSD, I see the old machine specs say that the hard disc is SATA. The newer SSD's are listed as SATA II or SATA III.
Do they all fit?

 

[grober]

Difference between SATA I, SATA II and SATA III
YES backward compatible BUT data transfer speed will be interface limited--- back to hardware limitations again.