> I can put a SSD and more RAM in my eight-year-old laptop and make it work just about as well as a new one.
I did exactly that with an old i3 based all-in-one Sony Vaio PC my dad handed down to me. It previously had a 3.5" 5400rpm spinner and 4GB of RAM and would take a month of Sundays to boot. I installed a 250GB SSD and another 4GB of RAM and it totally transformed the machine. All it cost was GBP62.00 (I got an amazing Black Friday deal on both SSD and memory). Hell, the thing can even run Visual Studio 2015 and a couple of CentOS VM's on Virtual Box and still feel quite responsive.
I did exactly that with an old i3 based all-in-one Sony Vaio PC my dad handed down to me. It previously had a 3.5" 5400rpm spinner and 4GB of RAM and would take a month of Sundays to boot. I installed a 250GB SSD and another 4GB of RAM and it totally transformed the machine. All it cost was GBP62.00 (I got an amazing Black Friday deal on both SSD and memory). Hell, the thing can even run Visual Studio 2015 and a couple of CentOS VM's on Virtual Box and still feel quite responsive.