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My now 4 or 5 year old laptop is starting to die. The CD drive no longer works. Now I know this could likely be repaired relatively cheaply but I'm thinking a new Windows laptop (or all in one desktop) is worth considering too. What should I be looking for? Budget is up to £750, including a CD drive (built in or seperate). If someone could shed some benefits of SSD with a much smaller capacity than similar priced HDD that would be great as a starting point. TIA
What do you need the cd drive for? Would an external one do as it seems like they're not really included on new laptops.
I like to be able to rip any new CDs I purchase to load onto my phone. CDs are needed for the car and also just cos I like to have something tangible when I buy music
Alot of money for a simple laptop, could easily get a good one about 400. I got one from these guys - very good machine. https://laptopandpcwarehouse.com/
My now 4 or 5 year old laptop is starting to die. The CD drive no longer works.
That's not "starting to die," you could buy 30 replacement USB optical drives at that budget. Four years old is no age any more unless it was crap to start with, it's not the 1990s any more. What's actually wrong with it?
If someone could shed some benefits of SSD with a much smaller capacity than similar priced HDD that would be great as a starting point.
They're exponentially faster.
What’s actually wrong with it?
Got a few sticky keys, optical drive is dead, 1 USB port no longer works. The main bugger is the optical drive (which I have just ordered an external replacement for).
Is speed worth losing 50-75% of storage capacity for? In my budget there are units with 256Gb SSD or 1Tb HDD
Got a few sticky keys, optical drive is dead, 1 USB port no longer works.
Are you particularly hard on your kit? Go Lenovo.
Is speed worth losing 50-75% of storage capacity for?
The short answer is "yes" but how much storage are you currently using? How much actually needs to be on the laptop rather than on external storage / a local file server / a NAS / cloud storage?
"In your budget" you could get something with a shit disk and buy a 500GB+ SDD to swap it with. Use the removed one for backups.
Not hard on it, just stupidly don't look after it as well as I should. Current one is a Lenovo.
As far as backing up goes I'd have no issues buying an external hard drive.
Is speed worth losing 50-75% of storage capacity for? In my budget there are units with 256Gb SSD or 1Tb HDD
Yes. The big question here is why are you still buying CDs 😂
What are you going to do when your next car doesn't have a CD player?
Is speed worth losing 50-75% of storage capacity for? In my budget there are units with 256Gb SSD or 1Tb HDD
How much space are you using now? What are you actually doing on the laptop? Nearly all use cases you'd be better off with an internal SSD and if you needed more storage and external HDD/NAS or even cloud storage.