If you currently have HDD only, an SSD is without doubt the single most significant overall upgrade you could give a system. In terms of life expectancy, the most common fatal failures of recent-ish laptops seem to be dying VRM circuitry in the motherboard - but can't put a figure on what you might expect.

However before any advice, you need to say why - what vintage activities are you doing on this laptop? And what needs speeding up? If you're bottlenecked by the (I)GPU, no SSD is going to fix that...

I think I’m just comfortable with my laptop and how I’m using it I feel overwhelmed looking at the brand new ones that’s why I’m looking at upgrading it rather than replacing it with a modern one to squeeze some life and power out of it. Tho a new one would have more power for the emulation, the old one is powerful enough for the so called modern games I have. The last games I’ve bought for it were Skyrim and StarCraft 2

that i7 is like a desktop i3, even a tad slower due to limited TDP. compared to the mobile i3 and i5, you get a few more mhz and 1 MB extra L3 cache. it may be worth considering if you can get it for very cheap from ali or something and don't have any real expectations.

Cheap SSDs need to be powered every few months or they forget all the data.

Samsung professional (red) SSDs are better, but a HDD is still the most reliable.

Also some first gen intel laptops shared generations into second gen, so you can replace the motherboard and get faster graphics and the ability to fit a i7-2720QM which supports DDR3-1600. I did that with one of my laptops.

The i7 cpu upgrade allegedly is about 40% better on the cpu score than the one I have and I can get it for about £10-£20 from china.
It listed a score of a bout 2100 against mine of only about 1300.
And I don’t know how well I trust ssd with all the mixed stories I hear about them specially when it comes to price comparison.

so what is your current CPU then? passmark scores are really just arbitrary numbers in my book.

another thing you should probably consider is how well the cooling on your laptop works. if the new chip heats up more and causes the fan to spin up all the time, that probably won't do you much good either.

I’ve got i5 450m and my laptop is due a strip clean and repaste as well 🤣

you get about 300-400 mhz higher clockspeed and maybe some game engine can use the added cache for a little boost. there is nothing in there to give you 40% extra performance though, that's for sure.

For £10-£20, I'd just do it. Even if it doesn't make much difference for that price it's hardly a big deal.
Which OS and how much RAM do you have, anything less then 16GB became painful around the Windows 22H2 update.
SSD will make a dramatic difference in boot time alone.

All my hard drives are from old work on computers, most HDD's are fine (if slow) but a large number of SSD's are dead.
Unless you can get cheap/free second hand SSD's I wouldn't consider them.

I've done similar in the past, upgrade CPU and RAM on an obsolete laptop once hardware is dirt cheap.
Then run it into the ground for the next few years during which time the OS looses support but its still ok for basic web browsing etc.
Typically something more serious will die, or gets dropped one time too many (2nd laptop so kids get access) will be the final nail in the coffin.

1tb good quality SATA SSD's are $50 or less. The heat difference alone vs a HDD is amazing. The CPU upgrade sounds great, it will help a lot. If you have 8gb or less of ram consider upgrading to 8gb or 16gb. 16 is super overkill combined with the SSD. Laptop ddr3 is super cheap.

It’s win7 already maxed ram to 8gb made a difference and tried to sort out the ram hogs sometimes all of it gets used just in idle really annoying 🤣
Looking to triple boot win7 / Linux and batocera but most of the worthy ssd are about 128/256 gb in size or fork out for expensive larger drive which cost nearly as much as a secondhand laptop

@Greywolf1

If you want to use this in a retro context, sure, why not.

If you are seriously considering upgrading at 14-year-old platform for continued use as a daily driver, I strongly suggest that you reconsider.

There are probably newer and better performing second-hand laptops that you could purchase for the cost of that CPU upgrade.

I purchased an i5 430M base laptop in 2010 and it served me well for many years but, at some point, it just wasn't cutting it any more, so I looked at potential CPU upgrades. At this point , I realized that what I was doing was practically pointless. (from my perspective, yours may be different, of course).

YMMV may vary of course but IMHO, a 14-year-old (nearly 15-year-old) daily driver is absolutely pointless. It may die any minute and, if it works, it will be slow as molasses compared to even a slow Celeron N100 based system.

64bit isn’t retro in my eyes it hasn’t become redundant yet the way 8/16/32 bit have to be classed as retro.
It’s retiring my old work horse and fork out £1500 for something new and joining the windows 11 slaves from all the rumours I’ve heard.

Greywolf1 wrote on 2024-12-16, 19:01:

64bit isn’t retro in my eyes it hasn’t become redundant yet the way 8/16/32 bit have to be classed as retro.
It’s retiring my old work horse and fork out £1500 for something new and joining the windows 11 slaves from all the rumours I’ve heard.

a) Why £1500 ?
b) Why necessarily something new ?
c) Why Windows 11 ?

I have not bought a new laptop since 2010 .
I have bought and/or helped select Dell refurbished unit multiple times for my mother-in-law, my wife and myself several times since then.

These days, for example, in Canada, a Dell i5-8265U equipped notebook with 8GB of RAM (upgradeable to 16GB, but single channel in all cases) is less than 300 CAN$. That's about £165 and it's not even a special/rebated price.

That runs Windows 10 officially and probably runs Windows 7 unofficially (I don't have one at hand to try), but even if it does not, it's just an example. It does support Windows 11, officially, though, if you ever want that.

Anyway, my point is not whether a 64-bit OS should be considered retro or not, but that using a 15-year-old laptop as a daily driver and considering upgrading it in that context when there are newer option that are faster, less energy hungry, newer and inexpensive alternatives might not be the best path forward.

Finally, if Windows 11 support is something you know you will never care about, you will soon be able to choose from a crapton of "obsoleted" hardware that is much newer than your laptop at bargain basement prices due to Windows 10 going EOL in a few months. In fact, you probably have some options on that front even now.

£1500 is about maximum I might consider paying and there’s a lot I’ve been looking at that are close to that figure £1000-2000
And looking at new in the hope it’ll last as long as my old one did with good processor so I can use emulated systems smoothly
And if there are any new games I might like the look of to play needs to be able to cope need super computers nowadays just to run the operating system

I agree with the majority - there is no point whatsoever in upgrading a 1st gen "core i" series laptop, apart from "because I can". They are pretty slow for daily use and usually come with slow graphics making most models not an attractive option for retro gaming. Lots of them also come with pretty poor-quality display panels compared to equivalent modern machines. Most Clarksfield laptops are dual-cores with hyperthreading, a handicap you will notice in modern operating systems.

My advice - unless this machine is specifically required for some task, has hardware or software that another newer machine would not be compatible with or can't run, just replace it.

Greywolf1 wrote on 2024-12-16, 19:01:

64bit isn’t retro in my eyes it hasn’t become redundant yet the way 8/16/32 bit have to be classed as retro.

Not yet retro, I agree, but it is pretty slow.

Greywolf1 wrote on 2024-12-16, 19:01:

It’s retiring my old work horse and fork out £1500 for something new

You can get a pretty nice piece of kit for that kind of money where I'm from. Something with a very good CPU and a good GPU as well.

Greywolf1 wrote on 2024-12-16, 19:01:

and joining the windows 11 slaves from all the rumors I’ve heard.

Not all laptops come with a Windows license - you could look for one that comes with no OS installed... but now that I think about it, that might be pretty difficult in the UK (I'm guessing it's UK because you specified a price in pounds). In my country most machines come w/o a windows license to keep costs down. Still, if the laptop does come with win11, you can just download a copy of Tiny11 24H1 and install it on your new machine. No bloatware, no spyware, and it's based on win11 enterprise which gives you good control over update deployment, unlike the PRO/Home versions.

Still, if you really REALLY want to upgrade this machine, a quad core i7-740QM is the way to go, if your laptop has enough cooling and a strong enough VRM to feed the quad core chip.

Socket3 wrote on 2024-12-17, 13:24:

I agree with the majority - there is no point whatsoever in upgrading a 1st gen "core i" series laptop, apart from "because I ca […]
Show full quote

I agree with the majority - there is no point whatsoever in upgrading a 1st gen "core i" series laptop, apart from "because I can". They are pretty too slow for daily use and usually come with slow graphics making most models not an attractive option for retro gaming. Lots of them also come with pretty poor-quality display panels compared to equivalent new machines. Most Clarksfield laptops are dual-cores with hyperthreading, a handicap you will notice in modern operating systems.

My advice - unless this machine is specifically required for some task, has hardware or software that another newer machine would not be compatible with or can't run, just replace it.

Greywolf1 wrote on 2024-12-16, 19:01:

64bit isn’t retro in my eyes it hasn’t become redundant yet the way 8/16/32 bit have to be classed as retro.

Not yet retro, I agree, but it is pretty slow.

Greywolf1 wrote on 2024-12-16, 19:01:

It’s retiring my old work horse and fork out £1500 for something new

You can get a pretty nice piece of kit for that kind of money where I'm from. Something with a very good CPU and a good GPU as well.

Greywolf1 wrote on 2024-12-16, 19:01:

and joining the windows 11 slaves from all the rumors I’ve heard.

Not all laptops come with a Windows license - you could look for one that comes with no OS installed... but now that I think about it, that might be pretty difficult in the UK (I'm guessing it's UK because you specified a price in pounds). In my country most machines come w/o a windows license to keep costs down. Still, if the laptop does come with win11, you can just download a copy of Tiny11 24H1 and install it on your new machine. No bloatware, no spyware, and it's based on win11 enterprise which gives you good control over update deployment, unlike the PRO/Home versions.

Still, if you really REALLY want to upgrade this machine, a quad core i7-740QM is the way to go, if your laptop has enough cooling and a strong enough VRM to feed the quad core chip.

The i7-740QM uses a different socket and has no onboard GPU. It is not an upgrade option because it is not compatible with OP's current system.

Think I just have to accept that it’s not worth it to tinker with it beyond the ram upgrade I’ve done, its not as if it’s retro anything that’ll work with win7 will work fine on a newer system

darry wrote on 2024-12-17, 15:06:

Socket3 wrote on 2024-12-17, 13:24:

I agree with the majority - there is no point whatsoever in upgrading a 1st gen "core i" series laptop, apart from "because I ca […]
Show full quote

I agree with the majority - there is no point whatsoever in upgrading a 1st gen "core i" series laptop, apart from "because I can". They are pretty too slow for daily use and usually come with slow graphics making most models not an attractive option for retro gaming. Lots of them also come with pretty poor-quality display panels compared to equivalent new machines. Most Clarksfield laptops are dual-cores with hyperthreading, a handicap you will notice in modern operating systems.

My advice - unless this machine is specifically required for some task, has hardware or software that another newer machine would not be compatible with or can't run, just replace it.

Greywolf1 wrote on 2024-12-16, 19:01:

64bit isn’t retro in my eyes it hasn’t become redundant yet the way 8/16/32 bit have to be classed as retro.

Not yet retro, I agree, but it is pretty slow.

Greywolf1 wrote on 2024-12-16, 19:01:

It’s retiring my old work horse and fork out £1500 for something new

You can get a pretty nice piece of kit for that kind of money where I'm from. Something with a very good CPU and a good GPU as well.

Greywolf1 wrote on 2024-12-16, 19:01:

and joining the windows 11 slaves from all the rumors I’ve heard.

Not all laptops come with a Windows license - you could look for one that comes with no OS installed... but now that I think about it, that might be pretty difficult in the UK (I'm guessing it's UK because you specified a price in pounds). In my country most machines come w/o a windows license to keep costs down. Still, if the laptop does come with win11, you can just download a copy of Tiny11 24H1 and install it on your new machine. No bloatware, no spyware, and it's based on win11 enterprise which gives you good control over update deployment, unlike the PRO/Home versions.

Still, if you really REALLY want to upgrade this machine, a quad core i7-740QM is the way to go, if your laptop has enough cooling and a strong enough VRM to feed the quad core chip.

The i7-740QM uses a different socket and has no onboard GPU. It is not an upgrade option because it is not compatible with OP's current system.

I did not know that....