Help with upgrading Dell Inspiron 11 3185

[fordy_rounds]

My MIL is a teacher at a small school without an IT department, so I help her out sometimes.

She was recently given a donated laptop (Dell Inspiron 11 3185) to use. It's... well.... potato seems generous. It has a grand total of 32GB of (soldered-on eMMC) storage. With WIndows 10. When I opened it up, I found that while there's a big empty space for a 2.5" drive, they didn't add the SATA headers to the board (there's solder pads but no connectors).

It also has only 4GB of RAM, though that's pretty easily upgradeable, as it's a single SO-DIMM.

There's a microSD card slot for storage expansion, but it's capped at USB 2.0 speeds.

 

Full specs:

Processor: AMD A6-9220e with Radeon R4 graphics

RAM: Samsung 4GB 2400MHz CL18 (currently running at 1866 CL 13, according to CPU-Z, which means I need to see what I can tweak in BIOS)

Storage: 32GB eMMC (non-removable), plus a microSD slot (connected by USB 2.0) and 3 USB 2.0 ports, and NO SATA connectors

Screen: 11" 1366x768 touch screen + HDMI port

WiFi: M.2 A-key Qualcomm chip (I'll edit in the specific chip in a moment)

 

Use case: Zoom meetings, playing videos on a projector, web access

 

So the upgrades I'm thinking of giving her are a large microSD card (probably 128GB), since right now there's not even enough storage available to update WIndows; 8GB of RAM; and an upgrade to the WiFI card (it currently has an N150 module, I can upgrade it to support WiFi 5). I really wish I could just replace the thing for her, but I have only small money, not big money.

 

My question is, do you think these upgrades are worth it?

[jaslion]

No don't bother with the upgrades. For that money I kid you not you can get a better laptop on ebay. A sub 100$ i5 thingy is gonna blow this thing out of the water.

 

This thing will always be slow and just suck no matter what the task is so better to just get a device that can at least you know play youtube in full hd without almost dying for dirt cheap than use this thing.