OT: looking for advise on laptop upgrade

[Juan R. de Silva]

On Tue, 21 May 2013 02:48:02 +0000, Juan R. de Silva wrote:

> I have Dell Latitude D820 laptop with Dual Core 1.8GHz CPU and 1GB of
> RAM. The laptop is slightly over 6 years old.
> 
> Until recent I was satisfied with it. However with advent of new
> technologies it started performing poorly with DEs like KDE4 or Unity.
> Since I do not consider switching to neither Xfce nor LXDE, the only
> choice I have is either to upgrade RAM up to 4GB, which would cost me
> with taxes around $80-90, or to buy a new laptop.
> 
> However I'm not sure on 2 things:
> 
> 1. Would such RAM upgrade actually give me real significant burst in
> performance?
> 
> 2. This one is a tough one :-). 6 years old laptop could actually die at
> any time leaving me with 2 not need memory sticks and lost $90.
> 
> So, I'm trying to make up my mind, whether to upgrade RAM or to forget
> about it and to save $80-90 rather adding them to buying a new laptop.
> 
> Would somebody give me an advise on the subject and/or share his/her
> related experience, please? At least on the first item:-).

Well, what do you know?.. 

I decided to try the mentioned memory upgrade. Preparing for it I settled 
to clean the insides of my laptop first. When I opened the laptop I was 
amazed how little dust I actually found there. However, since I was 
already there, I dusted it with compressed air and then...

My laptop runs now 35-52 degrees Celsius vs. 48-82 before. Both Unity3D 
(12.04) and Kubuntu 12.10 run pretty snappy even with my only 1GB of RAM. 
My 7200 RPM HDD is certainly in help there too. So, I'm not really sure I 
need any upgrade now :-). Though I probably will do proceed with it.

I would never think such a little amount of dust can suffocate the poor 
thing so strongly.