gurus or just plain experts, ur input / advice would be greatly appreciated!

i have a fujitsu lifebook n6460 purchased about 5 years old.
(i know.. it's old, but it seems to run fine.. just slow of course.)

im trying to not spend on a new laptop
i already like this one and want to keep it and see what options I have.

simply put: WHAT CAN I GET (UPGRADE INTERNALS) TO MAKE THIS LAPTOP RUN FASTER IN GENERAL?

My friend told me the only thing I can do is get an internal SSD and install all my programs into it.

 

here's the oem specs
http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/notebooks/0,3...2361298p,00.htm

 

for 400 bucks you can get a dell 15" laptop, presidents day special...new.
http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segtopi...s&cs=19&ref=hbn
http://www.dell.com/us/p/inspiron-15-n5030...spiron-15-n5030

hard to beat. 5 year old laptop = long life. laptops arent meant to be used that long, imo

 

Laptops can easily upgrade: 1) HDD and 2) RAM.

Neither will cause a drastic performance improvement.

However, your specs indicate that it should be a "decent" machine as is.
Maybe wipe the whole thing and put Win7 on since it's quite a bit more streamlined than Vista (especially Vista Ultimate)

 

^ what he said except a 7200RPM would noticeably improve performance but still wouldn't make a big enough difference to overcome your Centrino CPU handicap.

 

if your looking to improve internet speed, you might want to replace the network card.. depending on how fast your internet speed is and how fast your router is.. i had a 2 1/2 yr old hp laptop and i just recently replaced the network card and started reaching/coming near the max internet speed wirelessly

 

you can also pick up a new netbook for around $200. They are pretty useless if you want to play games, but for anything else they work pretty good.

 

Those core 2 duo's are plenty powerful for general computing, so unless he's doing some processor intensive work, it should work just fine. Shouldn't really be a handicap unless the rig is being used for something that is taxing on the processor.

RAM is always a solid bang for the buck upgrade so i'd start there OP.

 

Biggest bang for your buck will be to wipe Vista and replace it with Windows 7. You should have a decent machine for normal (not gaming) use. I believe that it will appear to scream once you have removed Vista and all of the likely crapware that came with the machine. I wouldn't upgrade HDD or RAM until you've seen what a clean load of Windows 7 will do. (You may not even be able to upgrade beyond 2G of RAM in any case.) I doubt you would notice a HDD upgrade except that this would be a good opportunity to install Windows 7.

I've done this sort of thing several times: Buy a new HDD that is at least as good as the current one (speed, size, etc.) and install a clean copy of Windows 7. Then start restoring your data and applications. The advantage of this strategy (instead of wiping the drive and starting over) is that you can always go back to the old drive and recover any data that you might have forgotten to migrate.

 

SSDs make a dramatic difference in boot times and application launch times if that's what you're looking to improve.

It all depends on what you're doing with your laptop. It looks like you already have 2gb of RAM so upgrading that will likely not help unless you're using some demanding applications.