Upgrade old laptop or bin?

OnlyTheBestWillDo

It is agreed by people who are actually using laptops of similar specification, that it is worth an SSD upgrade.  The only people who are arguing are the people who are not using laptops of similar specification.
Of course the price is relevant. It's not worth it if you spend £100, but it is worth the spending of £17.50/£30.
Enough said...

Norman_Castle

OnlyTheBestWillDo said:

jamesd said:

Norman_Castle said:

We could start a cult called the SSD, oh dear, too late, it already exists.

SSDs or other non-spinning storage do deliver benefits. So do more modern or faster CPUs. Part of the art and skill is knowing when they are really useful and what the likely benefit is and that's also subject to personal opinion. And more that of the prospective end users than us.

J_B's friend will know whether she thinks the current hardware is fast enough for her parents and if it's fast enough for her most of the time it's pretty likely that she'll think the same about her parents use. My own guess is that 4GB of RAM is doing quite a lot of slow swapping to a spinning hard drive and an 8GB RAM change will eliminate most of that and probably with it the biggest pain point of the spinning disk. But the SSD is also very cheap and delivers its own responsiveness benefits and that's sorely tempting as well. But I doubt that either is truly essential.

Sadly these are the kinds of posts in which I need to intervene.

Thank you for bringing a smile to my face this morning.

prowla

OnlyTheBestWillDo said:

It is agreed by people who are actually using laptops of similar specification, that it is worth an SSD upgrade.  The only people who are arguing are the people who are not using laptops of similar specification.
Of course the price is relevant. It's not worth it if you spend £100, but it is worth the spending of £17.50/£30.
Enough said...

It is worth it if what you want to do is to upgrade a laptop of similar specification.

But that it not the question, is it? It ignores the context.

Me, I use an iPad for convenience and I have to hand a laptop; I rarely use the laptop as I can quickly browse something and close it again on the iPad in less time than it would take the laptop to boot up.

Since the use-case in this thread is whether to give an old laptop to a couple who currently use an iPad, the de-facto statement that fitting an SSD to the prospective laptop should improve performance may not be the answer to the actual question; for example if the end result is that they become disinclined to use it, then it is not money well spent.

So, simply churning out the same mantra again and again that it is just a matter of spending £17.50/£30 is missing the point.

Enough said...

GDB2222

There have been various offers for the latest generation ipad for around the £250 mark. You do have to wonder whether the best course is to sell the laptop and donate the proceeds  towards the cost of an ipad.  

poppellerant

I'm not sure why people are still discussing this topic, it's a simple no-brainer to me.

The OP's friend has an old laptop which they wanted to give to their parents for basic internet use.  Recognising it's age, the OP has questioned if the laptop can be upgraded - and it can, for a very reasonable price.  We have assured the OP that the laptop can be upgraded as per their requirements for not much money and this is now being considered.

So why then are people talking about triple-figure iPads? Yes they may perform just as well with a longer battery life, but this is a money saving forum and this etiquette should be adhered to and maintained.