I was given a second laptop not long ago. It's a few years old, and wasn't anything special when it was brand new, but was hardly ever turned on. I'm considering keeping it as a spare, and so I don't have to drag my newer lappy into the house from the warehouse when I want to do some work in the evenings. Is it worth making a few cheap/minor upgrades, or is the processor too old/slow to be good for much of anything? For what it's worth, it'll only be used for web browsing/work (chrome), and the odd spreadsheet update. I need almost NO storage, and will not be gaming, watching, listening/etc to anything on it. Acer Aspire ES15 Intel N3350 4gb DDR3-1600 500gb HDD Looks like I can upgrade to a small ssd (120gb) and 8gb of ram pretty cheaply. Worth doing, or will it still be a bag of garbage? Is the processor going to be the bottleneck?
Freah OS install, ssd, ram upgrade will make a huge impact of you don't expect to use it for gaming and shit. It'll boot quick and make a great web warrior.
That processor is going to be a bottleneck. It's not designed to run anything other than ChromeOS. There are some projects out there that would let you turn it into a very servicable knockoff chromebook, but it will always be brutal trying to run windows.
Installed an 8gb stick and a 120gb SSD this evening. Definitely an improvement. Still not going to set any records, but should work nicely now for the basic use it'll see. Thanks all!