In 2014 I bought a Dell Inspiron 3521 at Costco to use for general household duty. It worked fine, but by 2019 it was getting annoyingly slow. So I bought another Inspiron from Costco and put the old one on the shelf - intending to try to fix it sometime. Of course that never happened. Recently the "new" laptop has been getting to be as bad as the old, and it was time to sh*t or get off the pot. I spent a few hours reviewing Youtubes and about $75 on a new battery, SSD, and 8Gb RAM stick from Amazon. Also replaced the failing wireless card in this little bad boy, which cost $12.
The only tool needed was a No.1 Phillips screwdriver. The hardest part of the work was getting the cover off. The longest time was reloading the operating system.
I now have a computer that boots up in less than 20 seconds, and that includes the time it takes to enter my password. Programs, like the web browser, pop up instantly. Battery life of over 4 hours. Better than it was new and probably as good, for the purpose, as $600 at Costco could get me today. As a bonus it has no bloatware on it.
It was so easy and so successful that I have now done the same with the 2019 laptop and another that my wife bought in 2016 and retired 3 or 4 years ago. New SSD and RAM. Same result, similar cost.
I may have to look into this. I have an old HP laptop suffering the same issue. Runs fine, just slow as cold molasses.
I did the same thing. Upgraded ram and added a new SSD drive. There is a program called Aomei backup. I bought that and a usb to sata cable and cloned the hard drive . I think I had 50 bucks in the software and cable. No annoying Microsoft reloading and copying files. The software clones or creates a exact digital image of your old system on the new drive. If your going to a larger drive there is a step you need to do in windows once it's done to maximize the available space on the hard drive.
SSD m.2 upgrades are the easiest way to improve performance immediately. If you have an integrated vidoe chip, that will slave the onboard /bus memory pretty heavily, but if you have a fancy Video Card installed the discreet use is far better for Hi Performance stuf like Point clouds etc. Be careful to make sure the board of the computer can utilize the memory upgade, some boards are limited to only 16G , others 32. The main thing i look at when purchaseing any aptop esp, is that its ram is at a minimum, expandable to 64G if not 128G, and has a discreet video card.
I always put those type of jobs off because of the time of installing the operating system and running through all of the inevitable updates until it is current. But it is always worthwhile when you end up with a blazing fast computer again.
So did I - for 5 years. Then I discovered that it was far less time and work than I had supposed.
Doing a full reset and starting over is actually fairly painless, especially when you consider the benefits of doing so.
In my local neighborhood, I take in older laptops that people donate to me, then I do exactly what you describe. For the ones that are hopeless, I can often pull RAM or other accessories out of them to use on other ones that are worthy. Plus, I add some helpful free utilities and set them up with a simple text document describing how to keep it updated and maintained properly. Then I give them to other members of my local community that might have a need for them -- those looking for jobs, students who need something for school, or seniors that want to connect with loved ones far away -- and just cannot afford to buy one.
I did a bunch of these right before Christmas and the looks on people's faces and the gratitude they show makes it all worthwhile. I have a couple more in the queue to refurb, so I'll get to see those smiling faces some more. Meanwhile, I just buy a new laptop every 5 years or so and then donate the old one to the community.
For the remaining parts, there's an organization here in town that accepts any and all old electronics. They disassemble them and send the parts to appropriate recycling facilities.
It sounds like you are Salem's answer to FreeGeek. Karma must be looking favorably at you.
I try to reformat my workstation annually around the holidays. Unfortunately, my workload for the last couple of years has made it next to impossible. I'm going on four years and can tell it is time. Some of the little issues that pop up are just annoying.
To make things a little simpler, I have one drive dedicated to the OS and programs. All of my data is stored on separate drives.
