My school laptop was pretty underpowered when my stepfather bought it for me. It was meant to be, since I was only planning on using it for school. Still, it feels like it's been slowly winding down the last few years as I put more demands on it. Particularly lately, it's been almost painful when I want to show somebody something in Word and it takes 5 minutes for the thing to start.
I suspected the culprit, where the bottleneck in my system was. So one of my little projects this break was to upgrade the memory (doubled to 1GB). It wasn't expensive and made a huge difference, and I think I've just added a year or two onto my laptop's useful life.
Now I'm considering a faster (and, incidentally, bigger) hard drive after the holidays. None of these things turn it into a powerhouse machine, but it will at least let me keep working. If I can spend less than $250 to keep a laptop going for a few more years, it's totally worth it.
I'm curious about the model and specs on your system -- I assume you're running some version of XP & that the HD is a notebook-standard IDE. What are the options for upgrading the processor? I ask because after increasing the RAM, cutting the HD access times are likely to only provide negligible improvement comparatively ....
OK, I'm done 'butting in' ...
I'm glad you had a good Thanksgiving -- big plans over winter break?
Take care,
--goof