In general I suggest getting a new laptop if you are on the 2nd core generation (Sandy Bridge) or older. If you are on a Celeron or Pentium and it isn't a recent generation, I wouldn't even bother upgrading the cpu, let alone ram. If you decide to go with AMD, you will want a Ryzen, nothing older. I typically try to get people to buy some of the used ~$400 ThinkPads on ebay. You can get a used skylake laptop for a pretty decent price. Though if you are a keyboard snob, then you might want to research a bit to find a proper keyboard. If you are wanting to upgrade a desktop, they sell some pretty low priced used cpus that might be worth it. The older desktop cpus had much better performance than the laptop cpus, at least back in the day. I usually try to not suggest throwing newbies on older machines with Linux. Sometimes people think that Linux is slow, when it's just their POS machine. Jared On Feb 6 2020 4:35 PM, Ted Pomeroy wrote:
NMGLugers, What do you consider system requirements in 2020? I recently had a personal lapse in common sense by trying to upgrade ram in an older Asus EEE. It was pointless. Negligible change in performance. I had a feeling I was wasting my time, but I "had to try." Really not worth the effort. And I repeated a similar effort on an older laptop last week. So, I ask you to think about what are the System Requirements for an adequately performing laptop? Processor- Hard drive- Memory- Ports- Accessories?
I have some ideas and will share them when we meet next week or if there is interest here. I think we can encourage wider adoption of Gnu/Linux by clearly advising newcomers and thinking clearly ourselves about not just keeping an older machine alive, but really enabling new users to take advantage of the great software we love. Free Software is great for all the things people do with a computer and we can help them see it if we think about what truly works. Thank you, Ted P.
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