Can anyone recommend a good cheap laptop

EveryWhere

fred246 wrote: »

There are plenty of YouTube videos on Yoga SSD replacement. I am sorry for using perfect too often. It just means that it works fine. Boots quickly with SSD. Internet pages load quickly. Never run out of RAM with 2GB.

The YOGA has an SD card(eMMc), not an SSD proper. Though yours may have the space for an M2 drive.
What you consider perfectly fine, someone else might consider sluggish.
I certainly wouldn't go back to 2 GB of RAM and no SSD on my devices. But that spec appears to be "perfectly fine" for you.

fred246

EveryWhere wrote: »

I certainly wouldn't go back to 2 GB of RAM and no SSD on my devices.

Why do people make things up? I only use SSDs. Maybe I get away with 2GB RAM because the SSD is used as RAM. Whatever it certainly isn't sluggish.

EveryWhere

fred246 wrote: »

Why do people make things up? I only use SSDs. Maybe I get away with 2GB RAM because the SSD is used as RAM. Whatever it certainly isn't sluggish.

No one is making things up. I referred to the original config of my Toshiba laptop. Yes, the solid state drive improves the performance somewhat. My Netbook has just 1.5 GB of RAM and a horrible CPU, but the fitted SSD allows it to be usable.
The Yoga utilises eMMc(an SD card, though perhaps with a slot for an M2 SSD).

hollie.weimeraner

EveryWhere wrote: »

Utter nonsense.

I'm currently posting from an eleven year old laptop. The ability to upgrade RAM and to fit an SSD, has kept this device usable.

Totally ridiculous to recommend a device on the basis that you could throw it away after two years.

Likewise, I have a 9 year old Dell XPS I paid £600 for from an ebay reseller. Just swapped the HD for a 500gb SSD and it's taken on a new lease of life.

I would say SSD is a must.

arciere

hollie.weimeraner wrote: »

Likewise, I have a 9 year old Dell XPS I paid £600 for from an ebay reseller. Just swapped the HD for a 500gb SSD and it's taken on a new lease of life.

I would say SSD is a must.

Yes and no. In my opinion, you only benefit from an SSD if your system supports the higher speeds of an SSD drive, otherwise the cost and efforts of replacing the HDD are not worth it.
Average speeds for an SSD drive today is about 4-500 MBps, which can only be met with SATA3 ports (max theoretical speed 600MBps).
If the laptop you are upgrading still uses the old SATA1 ports (150MBps theoretical, about 100MBps actual), the real speed increase you will see is a few MBps (a good HDD drive can easily reach 100 MBps speeds).

that

fred246 wrote: »

What do people do with all this RAM? My desktop PC has 2GB and works perfectly. If it didn't I'd put more in but it doesn't need it.

think you may have x32 version of windows?

I have 7 year old laptop running x64 with ssd. it was 8GB+4GB, but the 8GB became faulty, leaving the 4GB and it is now slower when using software like Paint.net or more than 12 Calibre (ebook reader) windows

arciere

that wrote: »

think you may have x32 version of windows?

4GB would still be supported.

that

arciere wrote: »

4GB would still be supported.

yes, and the x32 is quite good with 2GB, would not run x64 on it though

fred246

that wrote: »

yes, and the x32 is quite good with 2GB, would not run x64 on it though

Yes the 2GB PC is on Windows 10 32 bit. It's fine though. No problems. I have put 64bit on my PCs with 4+ GB of RAM.

EveryWhere

arciere wrote: »

Yes and no. In my opinion, you only benefit from an SSD if your system supports the higher speeds of an SSD drive, otherwise the cost and efforts of replacing the HDD are not worth it.
Average speeds for an SSD drive today is about 4-500 MBps, which can only be met with SATA3 ports (max theoretical speed 600MBps).
If the laptop you are upgrading still uses the old SATA1 ports (150MBps theoretical, about 100MBps actual), the real speed increase you will see is a few MBps (a good HDD drive can easily reach 100 MBps speeds).

This is really nonsense.

There is much more than just maximum sequential read and write speeds.

https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Faq/What-is-the-effective-SSD-speed-index/42

Otherwise, according to your statement, my ACER Aspire ZG5 would perform much the same with an HDD. It does not, not even close, by any measure.

At a guess, in a real world setting, I would say that an SSD fitted to a SATA 1 connection would be around three times faster than an HDD.