Upgrade or not too upgrade the great question?

[iceclock]

im on a limited budget for lets say 500$, im wondering with the following specs is it worth adding memory to make 8 gigs of ram+ an ssd or would i benefit more from a new laptop at this price point.

current specs.

i3 2.4 gigahertz.

4gigs of ddr3.

500 gig sata2 5400rpm hd.

5650 1 gig ati.

thanks.

and what would be best for my budget amd or intel thanks.

 

[Emerald]

it really depends on your OS.

if you have a 32-bit OS, it only see 4GB of memory; therefore, upgrading would be a waste of money

 

[iceclock]

im using a 64bit os.

 

[geofelt]

Ram is cheap, upgrading to 8gb would probably be a good idea.
If you have only 1 stick of ram now, you will then be able to operate in dual channel mode.
It is a small performance boost.

I would not look to change out the i3 unless you are using the laptop for cpu bound multi threaded apps that require a quad.
And... you probably can't change out the cpu on an existing laptop anyway.

The big improvement would be to replace the hard drive with a ssd.
I have done that on every laptop I have purchased.
You will be amazed by the difference in everything you do. I highly recommend it.
A 480gb ssd will be less than $500. If you really do not need that much storage, might a 240gb ssd suffice?

 

[iceclock]

id say 128 gb and 8gig memory kit would be good.

 

[iceclock]

Best answer selected by iceclock.

 

[iceclock]

thanks for the help