Worth upgrading 4th gen i3 laptop?

daphatgrant

Fi-yah!
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Hey [H], I was asked to speed up a 4th gen i3 laptop and wouldn't mind some input. It's a basic Toshiba laptop, 4 years old and has pretty much been unused. I'm wondering if it'd be worth upgrading it's 6GB DDR3 1600 (2&4) to a higher amount? It can support up to 16GB. Most of the 16GB (2x8) kits are less than $90 new. This'll be for light use, Office, Youtube, Netflic, basic web use.

Regardless of what I do with the ram I'll be swapping out it's 5400 mech HDD with an SSD which'll greatly improve it's performance. If I did the HDD and RAM upgrade I'd be looking at less than $200.

Thanks!
 
SSD is a must, first and foremost. RAM - maybe. Check Task Manager under normal use, if it’s getting high in memory usage then upgrade otherwise you won’t see a real benefit.
 
SSD is a must, first and foremost. RAM - maybe. Check Task Manager under normal use, if it’s getting high in memory usage then upgrade otherwise you won’t see a real benefit.
Thanks! This is pretty much my thought, 6GB isn't a ton of RAM but it's not bare minimum.
 
SSD will make it feel like a brand new laptop if it had a spinner previously.

Comments about the RAM so far are on point as well, but def start with the SSD.
 
Honestly you should be fine with 6gb if you just use it general purpose. I got a old 3rd gen i7 with 4gb on win10. It was very suggish til I popped in a SSD and have no issuse doing day to day stuff on it.
 
I ordered a 500GB 860 evo, I'll start with that and keep an eye on memory use, thanks everyone!
 
A couple of years ago I did something very similar to a refurbished 4th-gen i5-4210U low-end Toshiba ultrabook that originally had 6 GB of DDR3-1600 RAM and a lousy 750 GB Toshiba 5400 RPM HDD that had extremely bad random performance and took (literally) 20 minutes every time Windows booted. At the time I was planning to run the then-latest version of Adobe Premiere Pro CC on that laptop, so I upgraded to a 250 GB Samsung 850 EVO 2.5" SATA SSD and replaced the 2 GB stick of RAM with a 4 GB one, It improved performance while at the same time enabled GPU accelerated rendering that didn't get enabled when it had only 6 GB. Then, I upgraded to 16 GB and left it there.
 
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