Should I Replace My Laptop?

[Gammahooch13]

I have a Dell Inspiron 15 5547 with the i7-4510U, 16gb of Ram, and 1 TB HDD. My laptop is or almost 4 years old and I have noticed it is starting to decline in performance. The start up time is past 30 sec and sometimes it hangs on the booting process and when updating it, is a hassle because it will slow down so bad that it takes forever to open word or edge. Trust me I have wiped the drive about a couple of times to see if that was the problem but its slow. I mostly use this laptop for school and some light gaming (because of this Intel 4400HD but I am a gamer and want to do better games) but now the light gaming I use to do, has decrease such as World of Tanks I would have at least 55-70 FPS in game but now I have about 25-35 FPS (that's on low/minimum settings). The reason I am asking is because recently best buy has some good deals on an Asus GL702VS which usually sells for $1600 but an open box with warranty usually sells at $1150-$1250 (which that laptop has a GTX 1070 with 12gb of ram, 1TB HDD and options to upgrade for a NVMe M.2 SSD and a G-Sync monitor with 75Hz refresh rate), I don't know if I keep for a little bit longer or just replace it now?

[3rrant]

2 minutes ago, Gammahooch13 said:

I have a Dell Inspiron 15 5547 with the i7-4510U, 16gb of Ram, and 1 TB HDD. My laptop is or almost 4 years old and I have noticed it is starting to decline in performance. The start up time is past 30 sec and sometimes it hangs on the booting process and when updating it, is a hassle because it will slow down so bad that it takes forever to open word or edge. Trust me I have wiped the drive about a couple of times to see if that was the problem but its slow. I mostly use this laptop for school and some light gaming (because of this Intel 4400HD but I am a gamer and want to do better games) but now the light gaming I use to do, has decrease such as World of Tanks I would have at least 55-70 FPS in game but now I have about 25-35 FPS (that's on low/minimum settings). The reason I am asking is because recently best buy has some good deals on an Asus GL702VS which usually sells for $1600 but an open box with warranty usually sells at $1150-$1250 (which that laptop has a GTX 1070 with 12gb of ram, 1TB HDD and options to upgrade for a NVMe M.2 SSD and a G-Sync monitor with 75Hz refresh rate), I don't know if I keep for a little bit longer or just replace it now?

I would wait. Your CPU is still perfectly in line with new ones. You probably have two problems here:

 

The HDD. Change it to an SSD and your world will go hell faster.

The temperatures. If you've never opened you notebok to clean it and replace the thermal paste, do it. Since you surely have no warranty left it can really restore it to a much more factory-like performance.

[Castdeath97]

If you want to game on it then sure, getting something with a dedicated graphic card will do really well. But the 1070 is ridiculously overkill for WoT, only get it if you plan on playing something else.

 

Your old computer looks like it needs a clean windows install and an SSD, it will improve its performance a lot but not with games the HD 4400 is gonna hold it back.

[genexis_x]

15 minutes ago, ErrantNyles said:

Change it to an SSD

^^this, highly recommended

[MaxBunny]

30 minutes ago, Gammahooch13 said:

 I don't know if I keep for a little bit longer or just replace it now?

If you hold out for coffeelake you might get some notably good performance/optimization that will add to its longevity. The other way is to buy some of the older stock (skylake laptops for example) that are getting clearance prices, which is probably the better option for value/performance.

[Gammahooch13]

1 hour ago, ErrantNyles said:

I would wait. Your CPU is still perfectly in line with new ones. You probably have two problems here:

 

The HDD. Change it to an SSD and your world will go hell faster.

The temperatures. If you've never opened you notebok to clean it and replace the thermal paste, do it. Since you surely have no warranty left it can really restore it to a much more factory-like performance.

I cleaned off and reapplied thermal paste about 6 months ago and I open the back and regularly clean everything with computer duster about once a month or once every two months because since where I am at not that much dust and I clean my place on a regular basis.

1 hour ago, Castdeath97 said:

If you want to game on it then sure, getting something with a dedicated graphic card will do really well. But the 1070 is ridiculously overkill for WoT, only get it if you plan on playing something else.

 

Your old computer looks like it needs a clean windows install and an SSD, it will improve its performance a lot but not with games the HD 4400 is gonna hold it back.

As said above I want to do better games.

I would like to upgrade my HDD but since this laptop is performance is going down, so I don't know if I should invest more money in this laptop because I had to fix it a couple of times with my own money because the warranty ran out and that's usually when all my problems love to show up. 

 

I thank you guys for the feedback, it just being at a crossroad like this usually sucks.

 

[Teddy07]

I have an older laptop with an i7 2760qm. I did upgrade the CPU but I don't really notice any improvement. However, the upgrade to an SSD is huge.

[Zodiark1593]

Ssd from a spinner (no less a pokey laptop spinner) is a massive difference. It won't improve framerate any, but it makes a system much nicer to use.

[Imglidinhere]

You can always acquire an older Lenovo Y50-70 for around $550 used pretty much at any time. Just repaste the CPU/GPU and you're golden from there.

[ErrystioT]

Like everyone here, replace your HDD with a SATA3 SSD, it's cheaper to get at this point now. The performance gain is really worth the cost. Your i7-4510U is still capable for many non-gaming or content creation related tasks.

 

**EDIT**

My Dell Venue 11 Pro with i5-4300Y, 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD is still capable for my non-gaming needs and was bought in 2015 (Though I acquired it just recently around 2 months back from my dad as he is now using Surface Pro 2017). For heavy stuffs, I have my Lenovo IdeaPad Y400 (bought in 2013) for it, which is still highly capable until today. [specs in signature]

Edited September 27, 2017 by ErrystioT
added more info