Laptops Need help upgrading six-year-old laptop

shauvik_r

shauvik_r

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Hi everyone. I bought a Dell Inspiron 5000 series laptop back in 2018 when I had just started University. I haven't used it much since university because I've always had my pc with me. Now my mother is asking me if she can have the laptop to take online classes for her students (she is a teacher). I will buy her a laptop eventually but for now, I want to know if it's worth upgrading the ram and adding an SSD (running on an HDD now) to the laptop to inject some life into it. If it's worth it, can you direct me to what RAM and SSD I should buy for this laptop? I have extensive experience upgrading PCs but this is the first time I've ever opened up a laptop. Any help would be very helpful. Both 1st hand or 2nd hand SSD and RAM options are fine by me.

I have attached pictures of the motherboard, present ram, and HWInfo below. Any help is appreciated.
 

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The 8 GB RAM you have is more than enough for the use case described.

Your laptop motherboard has an M.2 SSD slot. You can see it marked as SSD on the Motherboard picture you have provided.

You now have 3 options.

1. Buy a 256GB M.2 SSD and use it as the boot drive while the HDD remains for other storage purposes.

2. Buy a 512 GB M.2 SSD and use it as the sole drive.

3. Buy a 512 GB or Higher capcaity SATA SSD and use it as the sole drive.

The advantage of 1 and 2 compared to 3 is the increase in speeds provided by M.2 SSDs. Please check what generation your MoBo is capable of and buy accordingly. @aasimenator has a thread for used 512 GB M.2 SSDs in the reseller section.

When using SATA SSDs your speed is limited by the 6Gbps SATA III speed limit. The advantage here is the cost. Compare the prices and see which fits your budget.

I would use 2, since the price difference between 256 and 512 GB nVMe drives isn't that high and by doing this you reduce the weight of your laptop by a few grams and get high speeds and don't have to worry about your storage getting corrupted anymore (due to no mechanical parts).

However, if you feel the need to have a lot of storage, @Ankit Manchanda has a reseller thread for high capacity M.2 nVMe and SATA drives, check his out too.

The RAM is DDR4. Get another stick of 8GB and you will have dual channel matching RAMs. However this is overkill in my opinion for this usecase. I have a HomeLab running on a similar i5 8th Gen Laptop with 8 Gigs of RAM and I hardly ever face any issues.

All the best.
 
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Definitely no doubt excellent advise by @badwhitevision but if you have the budget then go with additional 8GB of RAM and be done with the upgrades on this laptop.
It'll help with multi tasking + more chrome tabs and since this is an 8th gen machine, Windows 11 will also be supported and you won't need a new laptop at all for the general purpose computing for nearly 5+ years.

Also, since I've used NVME and SATA based M.2 SSDs both on multiple machines, there's practically no difference in the overall general usage of desktop and application launch speeds.
NVME will make a difference when you're transferring large files (sequential speed), random speeds are similar. So get the one which is cheaper.
Nowadays, NVME is cheaper and easier to find.

I don't think your mother would be a data hoarder so option 2 is good. Just get that spinning rust out of the laptop so that even slightly mishandling it doesn't damage any moving parts (since there won't be any) + it reduces weight.
 
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