Is it worth upgrading a laptop?

rob-nikon · 27 Dec 2015

I've been thinking of upgrading my current laptop to MacBook Air/Pro (I have posted a couple of threads already) but looking at the costs of a worthwhile upgrade it seems my initial budget would have to increase to around £500-600 to get something like a retina screen, 8GB RAM and 250GB that I wouldn't grow out of so fast. I could upgrade to an older non retina MacBook air/pro for around £400.

Tonight I've checked the Crucial website to see what it would cost to upgrade my current laptop to 8gb RAM and 240GB SSD. Its possible to do an upgrade for about £80. I'm now thinking whether it would be worth upgrading my current laptop for £80 rather than spend £400-600 on an 'upgrade' MacBook pro/air. Currently my use is going to be a little editing in Lightroom 6 whilst travelling 4-5 times a year, updating website/blog, internet surfing, flickr uploads, backup of photos to laptop hard drive etc.

My current laptop spec is:

Processor: AMD E-450 1.65GHz
Hard drive: 320GB
RAM: 4GB DDR3
Graphics: AMD Radeon™ Graphics
Screen: 1366 x 768
USB2 ports x3

The Crucial scan details:

http://uk.crucial.com/gbr/en/scanview/A124BCC731D926C3

For the infrequent use its going to get per year it seems a waste to spend so much on a MacBook Air/Pro (£400-600) when a £30-80 upgrade of my current laptop could be sufficient for my current needs the few times its going to be used. Would it be best to upgrade only the RAM for £30 or both the RAM and hard drive for £80 or not do any mods and just bite the bullet and go with a new laptop, or stick with what I've got and do nothing.

Alastair · 27 Dec 2015

rob-nikon said:
Tonight I've checked the Crucial website to see what it would cost to upgrade my current laptop to 8gb RAM and 240GB SSD. Its possible to do an upgrade for about £80.

Lots of deals about at the moment, not a lot more would get you a 480GB SSD (see current Amazon deals). If what you've got is ok don't rush to replace it. Adding extra RAM is never a bad idea.

rob-nikon · 27 Dec 2015

Alastair said:
Lots of deals about at the moment, not a lot more would get you a 480GB SSD (see current Amazon deals). If what you've got is ok don't rush to replace it. Adding extra RAM is never a bad idea.

Currently my laptop is a little slow running Lightroom and due to that it doesn't get much use. Depending on price a 480gb SSD would be nice but I'm not really going to use it to its full potential. 240gb would be plenty considering photos are going to be transferred to my desktop when I get back home.

I'm currently thinking trying just the 8gb RAM isn't too much of loss if it doesn't make too much of a performance difference.

Mike-a · 27 Dec 2015

I'd say the opposite and get an SSD in it. All my PCs have them and its the best upgrade ever. Plus if you do get a new laptop you can simply swap your SSD into it.
My laptop is ancient and runs LR and PS6 well enough to be totally usable.
Core2Duo 2.2ghz
4gb ram
250gb SSD
and some sort of AMD graphics card.

Mintchocs · 27 Dec 2015

I currently use LR 5.7 on a 2Ghz dual core with 4gb RAM and a 5400rpm hd. I find the performance acceptable. Upgrading your hard drive to a SSD and 8gb of RAM will only give you a modest increase in performance. Increasing your cpu/ processor speed would give you a much better boost in performance, something not possible on a laptop.

Mike-a · 27 Dec 2015

Getting slightly OT, but it is possible on a lot of laptops, mine originally had a 1.8ghz C2D which I swapped for the current 2.2ghz.
Depends how comfortable you are with taking your laptop apart.

rob-nikon · 27 Dec 2015

Mike-a said:
I'd say the opposite and get an SSD in it. All my PCs have them and its the best upgrade ever. Plus if you do get a new laptop you can simply swap your SSD into it.
My laptop is ancient and runs LR and PS6 well enough to be totally usable.
Core2Duo 2.2ghz
4gb ram
250gb SSD
and some sort of AMD graphics card.

I can use lightroom, its just the sliders are a little slow. Interesting you mention swapping SSD to other laptops. Its something I've thought of but I wasn't sure if it was possible/compatible.

rob-nikon · 27 Dec 2015

Mintchocs said:
I currently use LR 5.7 on a 2Ghz dual core with 4gb RAM and a 5400rpm hd. I find the performance acceptable. Upgrading your hard drive to a SSD and 8gb of RAM will only give you a modest increase in performance. Increasing your cpu/ processor speed would give you a much better boost in performance, something not possible on a laptop.

that's one of my concerns where its going to give a noticeable performance increase.

Mike-a · 27 Dec 2015

My SSD has been in three different machines, usually with a clean install but cloning your current drive to a new SSD is a doddle.
I know LR/PS love fast processors and a good amount of ram but, as I said earlier, as a general upgrade an SSD is hard to beat.
Looking at your Crucial scan I'm surprised your laptop only has a single memory slot. I wonder if the lack of dual channel memory is having a negative impact on LR?

rob-nikon · 27 Dec 2015

Mike-a said:
My SSD has been in three different machines, usually with a clean install but cloning your current drive to a new SSD is a doddle.
I know LR/PS love fast processors and a good amount of ram but, as I said earlier, as a general upgrade an SSD is hard to beat.
Looking at your Crucial scan I'm surprised your laptop only has a single memory slot. I wonder if the lack of dual channel memory is having a negative impact on LR?

My current laptop is a 11 inch notebook style laptop so that probably the reason. I have a Mac desktop that I use as my main photography editing computer. I would like a mobile device I can store raw files on and do a little editing on the go, I was hoping I could use what I've already got rather than spend more on upgrading.

lightshipman · 28 Dec 2015

I find my iPad good for on the go use, I save my images in raw + JPEG, in camera, and have a quick look and preliminary edit on the go, using the JPEG image, and do the full edit on the raw file at home

rob-nikon · 28 Dec 2015

lightshipman said:
I find my iPad good for on the go use, I save my images in raw + JPEG, in camera, and have a quick look and preliminary edit on the go, using the JPEG image, and do the full edit on the raw file at home

One of my friends does this but I have problems keeping enough free space to do it. I only have 3gb free space on my 16gb iPad. This may be an option if I save jpegs at the lowest quality size.

dejongj · 28 Dec 2015

Whilst obviously you won't gain anything in raw processing speed, I think you'll find that it feels like an increase since the input output like on so many machines is actually the main bottle neck for this kind of work.

More memory helps with less cache to be written to disk and an SSD helps with speeding up reading and writing.

However I think it would then highlight the next bottleneck which is the controller on your laptop motherboard which can't process the SSD fast enough. Therefore I guess you will not gain the maximum possible read/write speeds. You'll still have a gain but perhaps not as much as you'd hoped.

Naturally in the future you can take the SSD out and put it in a caddy for use over usb3 with a new laptop.

neil_g · 28 Dec 2015

Light room loves fast CPU and disk, RAM less so but that may help the system as a whole from paging to disk anyway (although fitting a ssd will speed up paging, its a lot of wear on the disk).

What is the make and model of the laptop? CPU upgrade might be possible.

rob-nikon · 28 Dec 2015

neil_g said:
Light room loves fast CPU and disk, RAM less so but that may help the system as a whole from paging to disk anyway (although fitting a ssd will speed up paging, its a lot of wear on the disk).

What is the make and model of the laptop? CPU upgrade might be possible.

Its a Samsung NP305U1A 11inch netbook. I'm thinking there probably wouldn't be much of a gain as the CPU isn't that fast and it's probably not worth upgrading.

I think I may have to forget processing RAWs whilst away from home, my current laptop would do everything else well enough.

rob-nikon · 28 Dec 2015

dejongj said:
Whilst obviously you won't gain anything in raw processing speed, I think you'll find that it feels like an increase since the input output like on so many machines is actually the main bottle neck for this kind of work.

More memory helps with less cache to be written to disk and an SSD helps with speeding up reading and writing.

However I think it would then highlight the next bottleneck which is the controller on your laptop motherboard which can't process the SSD fast enough. Therefore I guess you will not gain the maximum possible read/write speeds. You'll still have a gain but perhaps not as much as you'd hoped.

Naturally in the future you can take the SSD out and put it in a caddy for use over usb3 with a new laptop.

Thanks for replying, I think your right that I'm likely not going to see much of a gain from the upgrade because of the general spec of the laptop not being able to take advantage of the upgrade.

rich_ · 28 Dec 2015

I agree with the above. The SSD will give a modest boot time improvement (it will probably cut the time by over 50%) and an improvement in launching applications, but obviously will not affect number crunching. I do not believe that upgrading your RAM will make a discernible difference.
I guess if you can get a SSD for cheap then why not though. You can always use it in the next laptop if you eventually buy one in the next year or two.