Solved! Should I upgrade RAM and SSD or buy a brand new ultrabook?

[marcantoinegendreau]

Hello everyone,

I have an ASUS S400ca-rh51t-cb which is about 6 years old. I use it mostly for work on spreadsheets that have extensive data but I also use for watching movies, listening to music and surfing the Internet. It is not as fast as I would like but it's not slow enough to bug that much.

Here are its specs:
i5-3317U dual-core processor (1.7ghz)
4GB DDR3 RAM
500GB HDD

Is it worth it to upgrade by purchasing a 500GB SSD and adding another 4gh of RA which would cost me around 180 -200$ I guess, or should I just purchase a brand new laptop (ultrabook)?

What's your opinion?

 

[robert600]

" It is not as fast as I would like but it's not slow enough to bug that much."

Are you running it in"high performance" mode. If not ... try that - that processor will turbo to 2.6!

Worth Upgrading?
I would say yes ... certainly the Ram - an extra 4gb would be noticeable.
The 500gb SSD? ... it already has a 24GB SSD cache so you might not notice the huge boost in performance that most do when converting from a HDD to an SSD. Presumably your laptop is already booting from and running your frequent programs from the cache SSD - at least I think that is the idea behind the cache SSD ... I've never had one so I have no idea how well it works. Having said that ... a 500 gb SSD would be very nice to have and would be bound to help.

 

[marcantoinegendreau]

I am usually running it in "normal mode" in order to save my battery, which makes no sense as it almost always has the cord plugged in.

As for the hybrid drive, I just found out last night after I wrote this message that my SSD cache stopped working when I updated to Windows 10 some two years ago and Asus apparently never felt it necessary to tell its consumers...No wonder I felt like the booting time took forever and the computer was slower (even though I thought it was age and a half-loaded hard drive). After much research and how to solve this I found a solution (command writing + a driver from Condusiv Technologies). It is now up and running and what it difference it makes on booting time and opening some files, even though the cache has just started to write the files I use most (almost five times faster from 2 minutes to about 23 secs!)

With all that I'll just buy some more RAM for now and wait to see if the SSD cache is sufficient. But so far I think it'll do.

Thank you very much for your input robert600