Acer Aspire 5051 - wish to upgrade

somurray

Hello,

I still use an Acer Aspire 5051 for college work (mainly for thesis research).

The laptop is 2006 era, it is ancient.

Now, all I need a laptop to do is word processing and web browsing, I already have a gaming desktop that does anything more fancy.

However, I am tired of my 5051, it is LOUD (one whiny fan), can get a bit hot (little help from the fan), slow (single core CPU and ancient HDD), HEAVY (2.4KG) and has tiny HDD space (60GB)

What is the life span of the average laptop? My laptop is close to 9 years old and I feel like getting a new one.


Which laptop should I get?

a) a Windows netbook (those 2gb RAM, 32gb SSD models); they are cheap and could do everything I need it to do but they may be too good to be true in terms of perfomance for that price.

b) a Macbook Air. I much prefer Windows for an OS, are there any good Windows Macbook Air clones?

jahalpin

somurray wrote: »

Hello,

I still use an Acer Aspire 5051 for college work (mainly for thesis research).

The laptop is 2006 era, it is ancient.

Now, all I need a laptop to do is word processing and web browsing, I already have a gaming desktop that does anything more fancy.

However, I am tired of my 5051, it is LOUD (one whiny fan), can get a bit hot (little help from the fan), slow (single core CPU and ancient HDD), HEAVY (2.4KG) and has tiny HDD space (60GB)

What is the life span of the average laptop? My laptop is close to 9 years old and I feel like getting a new one.




Which laptop should I get?

a) a Windows netbook (those 2gb RAM, 32gb SSD models); they are cheap and could do everything I need it to do but they may be too good to be true in terms of perfomance for that price.

b) a Macbook Air. I much prefer Windows for an OS, are there any good Windows Macbook Air clones?

The average life-span of a laptop is around 3-4 years max

The 2 options you have given are on opposite ends of the price spectrum

The MacBook Air is very expensive for the performance and you are paying for the style. Although, as they are powered by Intel chips, you can actually install Windows on it (you can buy a student version of Windows 8.1 from the Microsoft Store)

You have a number of choices of Windows laptops at the moment. The Asus Zenbooks look very similar to MacBook Airs, however they are a lot cheaper

If you are buying any laptop, try to make sure that it has an Intel chip and is preferably an i5 or i7.

Dell have a number of very powerful laptops available at the moment, you can get a 13in touchscreen i5 with 8GB for 799 (Inspiron 7000 13 2-in-1) at the moment (you should be able to pick up a 10% code on the net)

The Dell Inspiron 5000 laptops are also very good value at the moment

somurray

Thanks jahalpin,

The Dell Inspiron 5000 laptop (€599) looks good on paper, though it seems to be virtually the same weight as my current laptop. :pac:

Still, I would be interested in it regardless, I would immediately swap its HDD for a SDD.

What is this 10% off code discount you speak of?

jahalpin

somurray wrote: »

Thanks jahalpin,

The Dell Inspiron 5000 laptop (€599) looks good on paper, though it seems to be virtually the same weight as my current laptop. :pac:

Still, I would be interested in it regardless, I would immediately swap its HDD for a SDD.

What is this 10% off code discount you speak of?

The 10% discount is from the Dell VIP club. You can sign up on the Dell site

Capt'n Midnight

http://acer5051.blogspot.ie/2007/02/specifications.html lists some upgrades , but remember it's still an old laptop so not worth spending too much,
But use CPUZ to confirm the ID or open it up

for very light use it should be fine depending what you browse on the web and how many tab(s) you use
and light use means using older apps rather than expecting it to run the latest ones


The bad news. A 2006 hard drive is spinning rust , the platter is made of fragile glass and it's well past it's best before date. Make sure you make backups often, cloud or whatever https://www.mendeley.com/ is great for references. In fact stop whatever you are doing and make sure it's backed up now. And find out if you can use Ctrl-S to save, and do so at the end of every paragraph, I'd nearly say Save As with a different number in the file name every page, but that's only because I like to live dangerously. And if using microsoft office turn on backup option in Save As because it's as if speed is more important than being able to restore your document.

use procexp to see what's eating the ram / cpu - if you have a gaming rig then consider removing some crud from the laptop

You can get 240GB SSD's from €83-110 which can help a lot depending on where the bottleneck is. Not worth spending this much on an old laptop , unless that's the only bottleneck and because unlike a CPU upgrade you keep it after you recycle the laptop

Another option would be to get a CD bay adaptor so you could put in a second HDD , use this for swapfile and hibernation file and temp folders for speed and backups for security


backup and restore to factory default / wipe and clean install if you suspect software - but that won't turn a cart horse into a race horse


for new laptop
I'd recommend spending a little extra if it can get you a socketed cpu
but only if you're handy with a screwdriver , and it's a relatively new socket for which there are better cpu's available and you are OK with waiting two years or so for them to drop in price. Even then be aware that your BIOS might not support a better CPU and putting in one that uses more watts than your current one is a great way to accelerate the heat death of the universe or at least that part in the immediate vicinity of the cpu.



if running windows then use Disk2vhd to dump an image to a .vhd file
you can test the image on another pc - if your gaming rig is high spec you should get an idea of what a new machine might do YMMV

and dump the image on to the new laptop so you don't have to worry about missing stuff - setup shared folders between the guest and host and move stuff over to the host till all that's left is the empty husk

Capt'n Midnight

update

the bit about the second HDD in the DVD bay is mostly about having a backup when the other drive fails. moving the pagefile is just because there's a second drive and it might make it slightly faster

note battery life will drop with two drives, but with a 2006 laptop I wouldn't expect it to have much left.

students have more time than money and replacement bay's are cheap , you should be able to beg borrow buy or steal a small drive for half nothing
http://www.buyincoins.com/?r=search/index&cid=0&keyword=bay under a tenner delivered

you can even reuse the DVD as an external drive this way
http://www.buyincoins.com/item/42403.html €6 delivered


Thing is you can get an entry level laptop for €300 if you wait for bargains so there's no point in spending a huge amount in upgrading an old laptop, and even then it's a case of how much you value your time, for some people the learning experience alone can be worth it.

TerrorFirmer

jahalpin wrote: »

The average life-span of a laptop is around 3-4 years max

If you are buying any laptop, try to make sure that it has an Intel chip and is preferably an i5 or i7.

That's total nonsense.

He wants it for web browsing and office use - and you're advising an i7 and that a laptop will only last 3-4 years at best?

My own laptop at the moment is a Sandy Bridge Pentium from 2010, five years old and there's no difference between it and my desktop for web browsing and typing.

My other laptop is a Core 2 based Lattitude from 2007, that's almost 8 years old and it's more or less the same. Both have Win7.

Both have SSD's also which for example makes the biggest difference.

I wouldn't buy a low powered netbook myself but anything with an i3 will last countless years for those uses.

Buying an i7 would be ridiculous and a waste of money.

You could also consider a Chromebook, they're very affordable, very light, and very snappy. If its only for browsing and typing.

somurray

Could the way I installed RAM in the laptop be an issue?

It originally had 512mb RAM (single stick), I added another 2gb RAM (second stick; 2.5gb in total) a couple of years ago. It certainly speeded things up but could it have caused additional problems?