Solved! New Laptop buy vs. replace components

[elvisruns]

OK, I successfully built my first desktop several weeks ago with the help of some of the crew on the homebuilt systems forum.
I have a couple questions for those here on the mobile forum:
My wife has a 5-6 year old Dell laptop that seems to be getting slower by the minute. It's a Pentium M 1.70GHz processor with 1 GB RAM. Thats about all I can gather from checking her computer properties. What I am trying to determine is whether she can benefit from one or several things -
1) a bump up in RAM,
2) replacement of CPU, mobo, HDD, etc.
or 3) just go buy a new laptop.

She's in real estate, so mostly productivity/office oriented, but of course a lot of web-based applications.

Any thoughts on any of that, and if anyone recommends component replacement, is there a guide to mobile computing components anywhere on this forum similar to the "Recommended builds by usage" thread over in the Homebuilt section (either builds by usage or a recommendation from anyone on CPU's that are good, ones to avoid, etc.)?

Thanks in advance.

 

[overclockingrocks]

for something that old I'd say just buy her a new one. You'll spend enough on RAM etc to make it not worth upgrading. Though with that said you could simply factory reformat it and reinstall all her programs after having backed everything up. That usually speeds things right along. If that's not an option for whatever reason I'd just go buy new. You can buy a laptop that would do what she needs to do for probably $300-400 or if you want something that'll last forever just drop $1000 or so and buy a Lenovo Thinkpad. In all honest replacing components and such is a dead end as finding components like motherboards will be quite a challenge.