Worth upgrading laptop

[Mikeandike]

Hey everyone!
I currently have an HP Envy x360 from a few years ago
specs are an i5-5200u, 12gb of ram, integrated graphics and a 1tb hdd.
recently this laptop of mine has really hit a wall on the speed end of things with windows taking forever to load. My question is this, is it worth upgrading the HDD to an SSD on this laptop? or should I perhaps begin pinching pennies to get a new one? I do not do any sort of major gaming on it, at most some league of legends but the main purpose of this laptop of mine is for school work/ some very basic autocad drawings and java/c++ coding.
Thanks in advance!

 

[hdmark]

I would buy an ssd for it. I just did this with a laptop with much weaker specs than yours and it works way better now.
I would pick up a budget friendly 250-500gb ssd depending on how much stuff you store on it. And then buy an enclosure for your current HDD to use an external.
I picked up a cheaper 12$ usb 3.0 2.5" HDD enclosure to use with the 300gb HDD the laptop came with. I bought a PNY 120gb SSD , installed it, then put a fresh copy of windows 10 on it. I also added ram but mine only have 4gb so.

Best part of this upgrade path is, if you do decide to upgrade down the line, you can save money on your next laptop by getting one without an SSD and then just install this SSD. (if you do decide to do that, I would maybe pick up a little better quality ssd, maybe a 250-500gb Samsung 850 evo)

 

[atljsf]

the ssd will increase dramatically the speed of windows booting, the speed of apps loading, the browser, everything

the speed of the cpu will remain the same there and you already are over 8 gbs of ram, so add more ram wouldn't be a option

the coding, well, any cpu will do well, but when compiling major projects will be slow because this is a slow dual core cpu that is specialized on saving battery, not runing fast your proceses

i would buy the ssd, if the slowness you feel is produced by the hard disk not responding as expected, if it wasn't the reason, still you can migrate the ssd to a new pc or a new laptop f the one you get later doesn't have a ssd

if you do opt for a newer laptop try to get a model with 4 cores, that will fit better for the work you do and for the games, often a 4 cores cpu comes with better gpu

 

[Snipergod87]

I also agree with an SSD upgrade, once you do it you cant go back. You are basically upgrading the slowest part of your system which everything has to wait on, to something much much faster.

 

[Mikeandike]

Thanks for the help guys probably will just clone the drive i have now into an ssd and roll from there, thanks!

 

[dark_lord69]

The SSD will make a huge difference but your CPU is not fast.

Intel iCore i5-5200u
This CPU is only dual core and runs under 3.0Ghz max w/ 3 MB of cache.
The U at the end of the CPU name means "Ultra low power".
Lets put it this way... If you're in a car race; do you want the ultra low power engine?

I wouldn't get an Intel CPU with a U at the end if you end up saving for a new laptop.

Also, Your RAM is 12GB which means it's NOT running in dual channel mode. You could get two 8GB dimms for a total of 16GB and they would run in dual channel mode but the performance increase will likely only be around 5%. Which is absolutely NOTHING compared to upgrading to an SSD.

 

[Mikeandike]

OH i forgot to mention, the interface is SATA II, not sure if that changes anything about it.

 

[robert600]

Sata II means the ssd will only run at about half the speed it could - it will still be way quicker than a conventional hard drive though so don't let that put you off.

You mentioned cloning - it might be hard to clone a 1tb hdd to a presumably much smaller ssd.

Another option would be a hybrid ... I think newegg has a good deal on a 2tb model at the moment

 

[atljsf]

sata II is around 300 megabytes per second, the ssd, a decent one will work at 450 megabytes per second, you loose 30% of maximum speed

in reality, i have used emmc that runs at 200 megabytes per second, lower than the sata II, it was a very good experience, i didn't felt that machine to be slow at all

about hybrid hard disks, some say they are great, other say they are the worse, i do recommend the ssd

also a new high quality hard disk would help you if the one you have now is starting to die, newer hard disks do perform really well, but a cheap ssd wipes the floor with the best hard disk

 

[Mikeandike]

As for cloning the drive, it should be fine as I have 200gb of data going onto a 400gb SSD and I can maybe partition the drive to ≈400gb before the cloning, and I'm not going to use a hybrid drive as I already have an SSD on hand, never had good experiences with em too.