I'm planning a Laptop upgrade but will it be worth it?

[vibeit]

I have a samsung r439 Laptop, this was manufactured sometime around 2009-10 to give you an idea what generation it is. So I plan to have it upgraded but my question is it worth upgrading?

 

The CPU is an i3 M370 2.40 GHz 2 physical cores but 4 threads.

Ram is 4 GB

Hard drive is 328 GB.

GPU: 512 MB AMD Mobility Radeon HD 4500/5100 Series (it's actually a 545v)

 

I want to upgrade the Ram to 8 or 16, depending on what the mobo supports, as well as the hard drive to 1 TB. Based on amazon prices it would cost me around $104 not including the fee of the technician who will do the replacements. My objective is to give it a few more years of life. Also I plan to do video editing to it, yes it might not be that good of a system but I think I can manage. If it really gets old, I'll use it as a backup storage, hence, the 1 TB HD.

 

So any opinions if this is a worthy investment? I don't have the money to buy a new laptop, btw.

[alright_MEATBAGS]

You can save some money by doing the upgrades yourself. Upgrading a hard drive or ram on a laptop is fairly easy. However a hard drive dock might be required if the laptop doesn't support two drives or have an optical drive which you can remove to place a hard drive in just to do a cloning. To see a good performance increase you might consider an SSD as the main hard drive and buy an external hard drive later for mass storage. Upgrading the ram should help overall system performance. Since it seems like your planning to squeeze another year or two out your laptop and are not looking to buy a new one, I would get an SSD and 8gb of ram and call it a day for upgrades.

[Zodiark1593]

RAM and SSD should keep your machine kicking for awhile. In my particular HP, I swapped the i5-460M for an i5-560M that I pulled from a scrapped unit (royal PITA btw). With the SSD and new battery, it is plenty alive. 

[vibeit]

22 hours ago, VOLUNTEERbrowncoat said:

You can save some money by doing the upgrades yourself. Upgrading a hard drive or ram on a laptop is fairly easy. However a hard drive dock might be required if the laptop doesn't support two drives or have an optical drive which you can remove to place a hard drive in just to do a cloning. To see a good performance increase you might consider an SSD as the main hard drive and buy an external hard drive later for mass storage. Upgrading the ram should help overall system performance. Since it seems like your planning to squeeze another year or two out your laptop and are not looking to buy a new one, I would get an SSD and 8gb of ram and call it a day for upgrades.

I'm not really sure about SSDs because of the read-write limit (it's really the only thing that keeps me from trying it) on those things not to mention they're expensive. Although I like your idea of installing 2 hard drives on a laptop (I might end up discarding the optical drive, though), assuming my laptop will support it I might try it so I don't need to discard the current hard drive. If the technician can manage it, I might give SSD a try if a second HD won't fit. I'll use the Hard drive as a scratch disk for Premiere Pro.

 

As for the USB hard drives, that's what I intended to buy at first but after looking at the price, the 1 TB internal HD is cheaper than the external one so I switched plans.