Upgrade current laptops or buy new?

Newbie first poster here, so excuse me if I lack this forums lingo. Im having trouble deciding wether I want to upgrade my current laptops or buy a new one altogether. The laptop primarily will be used for email and online forum browsing, and sub frequent photo and video editing, then YouTube, maybe Netflix. I currently have 2 computers to choose from, short of buying new. Ones a Sony Vaio VGN FE670G with a 7200 rpm 100gb western digital hdd. The other is a Toshiba satellite M305 S49052, all stock, with a bad hdd. The Sony is running windows XP 32bit. The Toshiba has vista 64bit.i was thinking of adding RAM and hard drive space to the Toshiba and uploading windows 7. Same for the vaio, although i'm not the hugest fan of my Vaio. If you guys think buying new is the best option, feel free to post suggestions.My budget for a new computer would be about $700. Let me know, and feel free to indulge me on NBR slang a newb might not understand. Thanks! -John

 

If you have the option to buy new, you won't regret it.

Video editing on a 100GB (at least ~5 year old tech...) HDD? XP (12 years old...)? Vista (6 years old...)? What are you thinking!

For between $600 to $800 you'll have a machine that is easily 2 to 3 times the computers you now have combined (well, not quite, but you know what I mean...).


You need and IB platform with Win8x64 with 16GB RAM and a 256GB SSD (mSATA or SATA) and a second HDD for your finished data and music, photos, etc. Even if you have to spend closer to $1,000 (and again; given that you can...) to get this level of performance, it is money well spent (I'll guess it should last you at least 5 years...) vs. pouring time and money into something that will just make you miserable.

Sorry; just short and sweet for now...

Good luck.

 

usually i'm all for upgrading as long as possible but i have to agree with tilleroftheearth. for your usage, it's time to step-up and invest in a new machine that will last you another 4 or 5 years. Upgrading your current machines would cost almost your whole budget to do it right with all the nice new goodies and then you'd still have a 5 yr old chipset and mainboard that could fail at any time. not to mention the advances in bus speeds when transferring data from HDD to RAM to CPU tthen back to the HDD.

i say buy a new machine, then find a couple of cheap HDDs to replace the ones in your current machines and either keep them around for surfing the web and other mundane tasks or sell one or both of them on ebay.

hope that makes sense to you.

 

Great replies, keep em coming. Based of of your opinions, I guess I could pull off a thousand dollar budget, but I need some suggestions. Only think is i'm a windows guy, not Mac. Don't care about weight, or size really, but I like decent sized screens. I usually do all my shipping for computers at newegg, so I'll browse their and post what I find

 

You need a high - resolution screen then, IPS technology preferred. Unfortunately, that excludes the fantastic one Sony S15 has due to orange gate problem. Take the SSD drive and invest the rest of the money into brand - proven, reliable 1TB external HDD.

 

Consider an HP Envy with 1080p screen. You should be fine with a dual core CPU and integrated graphics for what you do, no need for a dedicated video card.

 

Just for note, the HP Envy dv6z with all stock options (plus 1080p) is $650 on HP's website.

 

Been looking at the Sony vaio t series laptops. Touchscreen windows 8. Great specs

 

Wouldn't consider it. I had a Vaio T for a few weeks, and I couldn't stand the shallow keyboard. Might as well be typing on glass. Rest of the laptop is "meh" compared to the competition.

http://www.laptopreviews.com/sony-vaio-t-ultrabook-review-2012-09

 

How often exactly will you be editing videos? You should upgrade given your usage, but you said sub frequent. Could you put a time on that? SSDs and a large amount of RAM are a waste if you are going to edit a few minutes of video every couple of weeks. I would look at the HP privatejarhead suggested.

You can also check out the Lenovo Y580. You can compare the Lenovo website prices with other websites to get the best deal. Get the i7 and the screen upgrades.