08-03-2015, 06:31 PM
SteveSpillage,
I just looked up the specs for that machine. Generally, I would say memory upgrades are worth it and disk drive upgrades depend on your storage needs. For me, Linux Lite 2.4 with many programs installed takes up less than 10GB of space. I give the partition it's on at least twice that space. The rest of my hard drive is for the swap partition and my home partition.
But for this machine in particular, I would say to look at its current performance with Linux Lite 2.0. The 900MHz Intel Celeron processor would be a concern for me, but if it behaves now, meaning if you're getting acceptable performance, I'd consider increasing the memory. Your machine appears to have just 1 slot. So you'd have to find one 2GB PC-3200 laptop memory module.
I would not put a new hard drive in this machine, and I definitely wouldn't try upgrading the graphics or sound cards. Those things, in my opinion, would not be worth it. If you're looking to spend and additional 50 pounds, you can do better. For example, if you don't have to have a laptop, I can tell you for under 50 pounds, I bought a used Dell OptiPlex 755 Small Form Factor desktop PC with an Intel Duo Core 2.3GHz processor, 160GB hard drive, Intel HD Graphics, and 4GB of RAM (upgradeable to 8GB) on eBay. It also came with a 1 year warranty. I bought it last month for a relative. It's running Linux Lite 2.4 very nicely.
I just looked up the specs for that machine. Generally, I would say memory upgrades are worth it and disk drive upgrades depend on your storage needs. For me, Linux Lite 2.4 with many programs installed takes up less than 10GB of space. I give the partition it's on at least twice that space. The rest of my hard drive is for the swap partition and my home partition.
But for this machine in particular, I would say to look at its current performance with Linux Lite 2.0. The 900MHz Intel Celeron processor would be a concern for me, but if it behaves now, meaning if you're getting acceptable performance, I'd consider increasing the memory. Your machine appears to have just 1 slot. So you'd have to find one 2GB PC-3200 laptop memory module.
I would not put a new hard drive in this machine, and I definitely wouldn't try upgrading the graphics or sound cards. Those things, in my opinion, would not be worth it. If you're looking to spend and additional 50 pounds, you can do better. For example, if you don't have to have a laptop, I can tell you for under 50 pounds, I bought a used Dell OptiPlex 755 Small Form Factor desktop PC with an Intel Duo Core 2.3GHz processor, 160GB hard drive, Intel HD Graphics, and 4GB of RAM (upgradeable to 8GB) on eBay. It also came with a 1 year warranty. I bought it last month for a relative. It's running Linux Lite 2.4 very nicely.
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