Old Laptop... SSD or New Laptop?

[BlueMountain45]

Hello everyone, i have a question about my old laptop that is now around 7 to 8 years old.

It is the "Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo PA2510"

Specs:
AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-50 (1.6 GHz Dual-Core)
2 GB RAM
ATI Radeon XPress X1200
120 GB Hard Drive (5400 RPM)

I have my desktop PC to do all my tasks and run my heavy games on.
But i hooked my laptop up to my TV. Like Spotify, Youtube, Netflix, Very light games.
It has become incredibly slow over time, and i think that the hard drive is definately the bottle neck of the whole system, but i am not completely sure.

So my question is.. should i buy an SSD with 60GB or 120GB or just outright buy a new laptop? Maybe even upgrade to 4GB of RAM?
Note that i won't be storing movies, music or heavy games on the computer, i will rely on streaming services for this PC and only a few light games to play with a controller.

I saw some cheap Kingston SSD's.. 50 euro for 60GB and 60 for 120GB. i know for just 10 euro more i get double storage. but i doubt i will need the extra space.

My goal is to save money while getting huge improvements for my laptop (if it is worth it) and get away with that instead of buying a new laptop for 400+ euro.

 

[Pirate Ryan]

From the applications you mention, I suspect the graphics being a bottleneck especially if you usually running in HD resolutions on your TV. SSDs will speed up the startup of your laptop as well as the startup of each application, but in terms of performance when the program has actually started, it will do very little to the speed of your system.

I would consider a new laptop. Anything above Intel HD 4000 is sufficient for light gaming + video streaming etc. I'm not too familiar in terms of AMD APU's but maybe someone else can help there. However, most new laptops should be able to handle what you mentioned. You can definitely spend under 400 euros though. This would be a nice place to start:
https/laptopninja.io/finding-the-best-gaming-laptops-under-500-dollars/

If you are gonna keep it on your TV and don't plan on taking it around, there are cheap barebones systems like the Intel NUC which need RAM and a hard drive. They cost about 300-500 dollars, but I don't know your local prices. Just something you can consider as a good longterm solution for your TV.

 

[BlueMountain45]

Well it was perfectly capable of playing videos at 720p some years ago (My TV's resolution is 1333 x 768) it has just become so slow to startup and launch applications. And all kinds of video playback have become choppy

I have seen such behaviour on my friends high-end pc... it started lagging in all games for no apparent reason and start-up time was beyond acceptable, even from a fresh reinstall of windows 7 and he then bought an SSD and all the issues were suddenly gone. So i just thought that an SSD would breathe some new life into it.

So considering that the hard drive is 8 years old it might be on the edge to die soon. But if it wouldn't do any good i might just get a new laptop or htpc or whatever there's out there.

and 50 euros vs 300-400 euros is quite a leap.

 

[Pirate Ryan]

Well it was perfectly capable of playing videos at 720p some years ago (My TV's resolution is 1333 x 768) it has just become so slow to startup and launch applications. And all kinds of video playback have become choppy

I have seen such behaviour on my friends high-end pc... it started lagging in all games for no apparent reason and start-up time was beyond acceptable, even from a fresh reinstall of windows 7 and he then bought an SSD and all the issues were suddenly gone. So i just thought that an SSD would breathe some new life into it.

So considering that the hard drive is 8 years old it might be on the edge to die soon. But if it wouldn't do any good i might just get a new laptop or htpc or whatever there's out there.

and 50 euros vs 300-400 euros is quite a leap.

The best way for you to check is pop in a newer HDD rather than a SSD. Maybe you might have an extra laying around? There should be no huge performance differences between the two if the HDD is in good health (in terms of when video is actually playing, not startup times). It could save you the money that you could put into a new system later on.

Otherwise, you can go for it and buy the SSD anyways and give it a go. There will definitely be some noticeable qualities from the SSD upgrade, but definitely not "good as new". I'd say its not a bad choice to go for a good quality SSD in the $80 USD range(I'm thinking samsung evos) because you can use it in any system down the road. Maybe swap it for your desktop one if you don't mind cloning the drive contents over?

Lastly, but probably something I should have mentioned in my first post: OPEN UP YOUR LAPTOP! I'm using my old 6 year old lenovo laptop and I just remembered I experienced something similar to what you mentioned. It is VERY likely that your laptop is throttling due to heat. I opened up my laptop 2 months ago and found the fan heatsink covered completely in dust. I removed it and cleaned it, reapplied thermal paste to cpu (under $10), and reused the thermal pad on the chipset. FPS in League of Legends went from 10 to 40+. Youtube videos viewable in HD again.

Hope that helps, and don't hesitate to ask questions if you are unsure about any of this!