budget laptop upgrade

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hitbyambulance
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budget laptop upgrade

Post by hitbyambulance »

my parents are kinda regretting purchasing their budget laptop a few years ago (an HP Pavilion 15-n028us). rather than acquiring a higher-grade refurb, i was thinking about the possibility of upgrading this one - going from 6 to 12GB of RAM and swapping in the Samsung EVO 256GB SSD drive from the upstairs computer into this one (and getting a new 500GB SSD for the desktop PC). this HP has an AMD A6-5200 CPU, which is surely fast enough for what they use it for (web-surfing and Skype video calls), if just the memory could be boosted and with faster storage added. this would cost about $170.

how does this sound? will this be a worthwhile endeavor? it's still going to be a cheaply-built laptop PC, but they haven't had any issues with it other than the web browser bogging down after a period of use. i've already virus/malware scanned the machine, and reinstalled the browsers. might try reimaging Windows 10 as well.
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gilraen
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Re: budget laptop upgrade

Post by gilraen »

Modern browsers are memory hogs, so adding more RAM will probably make a noticeable difference.
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Daehawk
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Re: budget laptop upgrade

Post by Daehawk »

GL in whatever you do HitBy. Got my wife a HP a few years back. It has become the slowest slow pos slow Ive ever seen. Ive done everything short of formatting ti and it stays slow. I have to find a copy of windows to throw on it before I delete it though and see if that helps at all.
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Anonymous Bosch
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Re: budget laptop upgrade

Post by Anonymous Bosch »

Unless they have good reason to need a PC, I strongly recommend considering getting them a suitable Chromebook instead.

For all intents and purposes, they're completely immune to the viruses and malware that are almost certain to afflict novice users with a Windows system, which makes them ideal for someone in your situation (no more worries about phone call scams claiming to be from Microsoft). They keep the bloat to an absolute minimum, and nowadays even come with quality hardware for a bargain price. Google has also recently announced that every new Chromebook launched in 2017 will be able to run apps designed for Android smartphones and tablets (they'll also be making that feature available on many existing models, too).
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hitbyambulance
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Re: budget laptop upgrade

Post by hitbyambulance »

Anonymous Bosch wrote:Unless they have good reason to need a PC, I strongly recommend considering getting them a suitable Chromebook instead.

For all intents and purposes, they're completely immune to the viruses and malware that are almost certain to afflict novice users with a Windows system, which makes them ideal for someone in your situation (no more worries about phone call scams claiming to be from Microsoft). They keep the bloat to an absolute minimum, and nowadays even come with quality hardware for a bargain price. Google has also recently announced that every new Chromebook launched in 2017 will be able to run apps designed for Android smartphones and tablets (they'll also be making that feature available on many existing models, too).
or i could just install Ubuntu with a lightweight desktop manager on this machine and it'll for sure run faster. they really don't use Windows-specific anything on this machine, so that's worth looking into.

EDIT: just talked to dad, and he was open to this idea. i had forgotten i also installed LibreOffice on that laptop, which my mom does use - and of course is also available for Linux. when i visit again in the summer, i'm going to install Ubuntu with LXDE on the *really old (their first) laptop they have for experimentation, as well as running it on that modern laptop with the Unity desktop environment off a LiveUSB install to assuage any hesitation on the parents' part.
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