Solved! HP 2000-2b49WM, is worth upgrading?

[metalicrabbit]

A co-worker of mine acquired an old HP 2000-2b49WM for $30 from a pawn shop a couple years ago and just had it sitting around doing nothing. He recently saw that I had upgraded the RAM in our boss's laptop (which is not nearly as old as his and thus certainly worth the upgrade), and so the very next thing he does is ask "Can you make my laptop faster, too?"

Here's the thing: It's an old HP 2000-2b49WM with a dual-core AMD E-300 1.3 GHz CPU. I *could* bump the RAM up from the stock 2GB to 8 and pop in an SSD. What he hopes to do is give it to his kid for homework purposes, and possibly watch/stream video from the Internet and an external HDD enclosure.

My question is, would those upgrades even be worth it on a processor that old, given his intended use, or should I just tell him to look into a better computer?

 

[hang-the-9]

All depends on how much all those upgrades will end up costing. Using used parts you can get the upgrades for about $100 or less total including the $30 originally spent. CPU is pretty slow but should be good enough for watching movies and doing documents. If cost goes over $100 you can get used Core i5 laptops for near that. I sell the X201 systems with 8 GB of RAM and a 120 GB SSD for $140 to give you an idea, which are quite a bit faster than that HP.

 

[metalicrabbit]

All depends on how much all those upgrades will end up costing. Using used parts you can get the upgrades for about $100 or less total including the $30 originally spent. CPU is pretty slow but should be good enough for watching movies and doing documents. If cost goes over $100 you can get used Core i5 laptops for near that. I sell the X201 systems with 8 GB of RAM and a 120 GB SSD for $140 to give you an idea, which are quite a bit faster than that HP.

I did a bit of browsing on Newegg, Amazon, and etc. for a quick idea, and new parts would come out to just over $80 if I also replaced the optical drive with an hdd caddy in order to keep the original mechanical drive for data storage while putting the OS on a 120GB SSD. Playing video from an external HDD enclosure shouldn't be too much of a problem, but I'm mainly wondering if it would be able to handle streaming off of the Internet, such as Netflix or even YouTube.