Is it worth it to upgrade this laptop?

[mayonnaiseblackhole]

My family has an old Dell studio 1569 laptop that has kinda gotten lost to the ages. Everything feels extremely slow and the battery life and heat output is really bad. I was wondering if just swapping out the hard drive with a 128gb ssd would be worth it if the CPU and Ram wouldn't bottleneck it. Just at Idle the CPU and ram are using half its resources and the hard drive is always at 100%. Its running an i5 430M with 4gb of DDR3. It is also possible to swap out the WIFI card and put in some more ram but at that point we might as well just buy a chromebook. If all were doing is just Web Browsing and other very light stuff, would it be worth it? 

[ki8aras]

3 minutes ago, DustierDolphin said:

My family has an old Dell studio 1569 laptop that has kinda gotten lost to the ages. Everything feels extremely slow and the battery life and heat output is really bad. I was wondering if just swapping out the hard drive with a 128gb ssd would be worth it if the CPU and Ram wouldn't bottleneck it. Just at Idle the CPU and ram are using half its resources and the hard drive is always at 100%. Its running an i5 430M with 4gb of DDR3. It is also possible to swap out the WIFI card and put in some more ram but at that point we might as well just buy a chromebook. If all were doing is just Web Browsing and other very light stuff, would it be worth it? 

if you're just gonna use it for web browsing then a cheap ssd and some bargain bin ddr3 would do the job nicely

 

plus some older laptops have socketable cpus so you might be able to find a better one on ebay

[Tthecreator]

Updating the WIFI card is probably a unnecessary.

If you have more computers, or are into computers having a simple ssd laying around is never a bad idea.

If you are contemplating on buying a chromebook anyways, simply keep the laptop and install a light version of Linux. And then perhaps add the SSD. 4GB should be just enough for browsing if you are using Linux.

Also you don't need to buy the fastest SSD, just a cheap SATA one with okay specs should be fine (though most SSD's match the max sata speed anyways). You might want to find out if your laptop is capable of SATA 6GB/S in the first place.

[mayonnaiseblackhole]

2 minutes ago, ki8aras said:

if you're just gonna use it for web browsing then a cheap ssd and some bargain bin ddr3 would do the job nicely

 

plus some older laptops have socketable cpus so you might be able to find a better one on ebay

do you have any suggestions for ram and the ssd? I don't believe that it has a removable but I doubt an i7 would make much of a difference

[Tthecreator]

2 minutes ago, DustierDolphin said:

do you have any suggestions for ram and the ssd? I don't believe that it has a removable but I doubt an i7 would make much of a difference

Are there even any empty ram slots left?

For the SSD, just find whatever is on sale at the moment.

[mayonnaiseblackhole]

6 minutes ago, Tthecreator said:

Are there even any empty ram slots left?

For the SSD, just find whatever is on sale at the moment.

no they are both filled with 2gb sticks. 

[ki8aras]

29 minutes ago, DustierDolphin said:

no they are both filled with 2gb sticks. 

i guess some generic 4gb sticks would do the job