Is this laptop upgrade worth it?

[Nitro]

I'm thinking of upgrading my ram and an ssd drive in my i3 laptop because there are specials on at the moment. Is this upgrade more suited for people using certain programs on it? I don't use advanced programs i just really do browsing the internet and watching movies.

 

[ponder]

An SSD would make your experience more pleasurable. It would have helped if you told us how much RAM you currently have, people here aren't mind readers (well except jingaling maybe but we've mostly called it a fraud).

Jingaling, how much RAM does Nitro have?

 

[Nitro]

ya i forgot to mention it's 3gb and wanting to get 8

 

[Nobody4]

Is it by any chance an Acer Laptop?

 

[ponder]

Do you ever run out of ram & does it page to disk?

I think 4GB is plenty for casual users. I've got 8GB and the only time I really see it being used is when I game and then it never goes over 6GB.
If it's cheap enough & you don't mind paying you could go 8GB but will you ever use it?

 

[Nitro]

I don't want to start from scratch installing everything. If i want to clone the main hdd to ssd what do i need to do? will i need some external enclosure for the ssd to connect to my laptop?

 

[ponder]

I don't want to start from scratch installing everything. If i want to clone the main hdd to ssd what do i need to do? will i need some external enclosure for the ssd to connect to my laptop?

Yes unless you have a desktop pc you can connect both drives to.

 

[NomNom]

I don't think it's worth it for your particular situation, unless you have 10 programs open and 1 of them in Google Chrome, or if you simply want things to load faster.

 

[Nitro]

ok thanks for the advice won't be doing it.

 

[ODTech]

I don't want to start from scratch installing everything. If i want to clone the main hdd to ssd what do i need to do? will i need some external enclosure for the ssd to connect to my laptop?

Kingston has a nice bundle in the V300 series. You get a chassis for the old hard drive and disc with their cloning software.
I just saw the OCZ deals on takealot though, i'm almost tempted to get the 240 gig for myself.

 

[CataclysmZA]

Do eeet. An SSD can help extend battery life by lowering the amount of time your CPU waits on operations to finish on the hard drive, and extra memory prevents paging to the drive sooner than with just 4GB installed. You might get an extra half-hour out of the notebook with an SSD, but the speed-up in general use of the OS is worth it.