[Closed] laptop upgrade - worth it?

I've got a similar laptop. I put an extra 1Gb of ram and a 160Gb hard drive and its much better and it was pretty easy. That said new laptops are cheap these days.

nickjb, any idea what would that cost me, bearing in mind i could nt do it myself?

It'd be about £20 for the memory and £50 for the drive to buy them on-line. Fitting is easy in most laptops, easier than mending a puncture. Re-installing the software can be a bit tricky. Not sure about getting someone else to do it, I'm a DIYer.

I know nothing about computers but managed to add memory and replace the HDD on my macBook at the beginning of the year without much problem. The hardest thing was finding a set of torxdrivers so as to be able to get the HDD out.

why do you think you need to upgrade it ?
You don't say what processor it has but my laptop of 4 years ago ran XP, Office (2003), Memory Map, and could surf the internet just fine.
Perhaps a hard-drive reformat / reinstall of your OS and apps would speed things up.

I'd wait for super multi cores and USB 3.0 but thats going to be Jan '10 and windows 7!

but you can get one for £400 or less that will be fine.

fubar

just checked the spes and it is;

30Gb hard drive

1.30 Ghz processor

224MB of RAM

no wireless connection either although using a usb dongle is not really a problem

the reason i want to upgrade it is that it is very slow and the hard drive is nearly full (probably alot of rubbish on it!)

is it worth it or bite the bullet and buy a new one

224MB sounds 'odd'...I'd expect multiples of 128 so 256/512/1024 (i.e. 1 Ggb).

With 512mb or a 1GB RAM and assuming XP then it 'could' be okay (assuming running XP...or Linux!). I was in a similar situation..upgraded a hard-drive, reinstalled all software, added memory, added wireless (a PCMCIA wireless card, if you have the slot for it, is a much neater solution than a dongle).
TBH doing all this put me on for another year but eventually I bought a new one...benefits are it's lighter, longer battery life, blu-tooth (love to use my blu-tooth mouse), USB2, bigger hard-drive...).

I'd say that if you can still get an XP laptop then perhaps get one...otherwise you want a reasonably well specced machine to run Vista....if you can wait we 'should' be seeing Windows 7 in the next year (think Rumour is by the end of the year)...there is never a 'right' time...

...re-reading original post...if you are considering paying someone else commercial rate to upgrade it then I'm guessing that it wouldn't be worth it...it's going to take a good few hours if you upgrade hard disk and reinstall all software. If you can do it yourself then perhaps...