Upgrade laptop

Donadea Leo

Hi everyone,
I ve very happily been offered a place on elearning masters. Anyway, my 10 year old emachines laptop needs a revamp. My plan is to invest in a desktop and monitor for my house, I ll need something relatively powerful as likely to be running hungry applications, video editing etc my question for here is if I add some ram, new hard drive etc. to the laptop will it allow me to make it some way functional for some of these programs. It ll be computer number 2 but could be useful for group projects, work whilst commuting etc. It's currently only running windows vista and won't let me upgrade the operating system. It hasn't been used a lot over the years. I m not 100% sure what to do to jazz it up or if it's even worth it. Any advice very welcome.

what is the cpu in it?

find out your cpu and go to here https://www.cpubenchmark.net/ and search for the benchmark score using the search / magnifying glass icon at the top right

if the score is under 2200 just don't bother.

since it's on vista you can't use any more than 4gb ram on that OS (software limitation) assuming it's the 32bit version

need to check if your laptop is up gradable to 8gb physically also. buy a cheap windows 10 key off ebay and upgrade OS and buy the ram (if you can find it -if it's ddr2 it's hard to find these days and may be too expensive to be worthwhile)

adding a 2.5 inch sata ssd (cheap) is the other must do if it's worth saving

you could also just buy a decent laptop as the new amd 4000 cpus can easily handle video editing. no need for a desktop and the price is reasonable.

then use a monitor if you want at home

look at the other thread here with the lenovo s 15 deal from hotukdeals

the 4600u cpu version and 16gb ram should be available for 500 or a bit more.

it's a 6 core cpu that will easily deal with video editing .

the most intensive video editing tasks are cpu-intensive more so than gpu

Donadea Leo

glasso wrote: »

what is the cpu in it?

find out your cpu and go to here https://www.cpubenchmark.net/ and search for the benchmark score using the search / magnifying glass icon at the top right

if the score is under 2200 just don't bother.

since it's on vista you can't use any more than 4gb ram on that OS (software limitation) assuming it's the 32bit version

need to check if your laptop is up gradable to 8gb physically also. buy a cheap windows 10 key off ebay and upgrade OS and buy the ram (if you can find it -if it's ddr2 it's hard to find these days and may be too expensive to be worthwhile)

adding a 2.5 inch sata ssd (cheap) is the other must do if it's worth saving

Ok score was 402, the kids will be delighted, they can still mess about on it and will get to use it a lot more, they ve been using code.org and it works perfectly fine for that. thanks for the ref to the Lenovo, that would be perfect, I think and seems like a brilliant deal.

antix80

I'd suggest you buy one decent laptop.. Switching between 2 computers sounds like a nightmare.