upgrading old dell laptop

So my mom has an older dell laptop with windows vista. It only has 1 gig of RAM and runs pretty slow. I was wondering if I put windows 7 on it and upgraded the ram would that improve the peformance of the laptop? I appreciate any suggestions.

 

Probably no difference

 

Windows 7 takes more harddrive space and requires more ram if your looking to increase the speed. Your existing hardware i.e. cpu or video graphic card may also slow the process down and may not be fast enough to run windows 7 or above..

It's all dependent on what software you are expecting to use on the laptop

Laptop prices are dropping fast so looking around for a new cheap laptop may be your best bet.

 

Windows 7 doesn't necessarily use more ram. It actually allocates more and uses it more efficiently, making it available to programs when needed. I'm sure you could pick some ram for it cheap. You can also add a usb drive and use Ready boost which in your situation may actually improve performance.

 

I think installing Windows 7 and upgrading ram would help. Windows 7 doesn't use more memory but it just uses it more efficiently. I have had Windows 7 on a PC with only 512MB ram and it ran very fast and smooth. More ram is needed only if you run memory intensive programs such as games and other applications that require a lot of ram.

 

For me it depends on how old your old Dell laptop actually is. For me personally, anything outside of 2 or 3 years old isn't worth the hassle of upgrading. The reason is that if your laptop was top of the range at the time of purchase it would generally still have good performance even after 2 years, assuming there wasn't any sort of underlying hardware issues.

Most people though tend to buy low end laptops which if you look at the internal spec will not be the best available at the time so you are already behind as far as technology goes.

That said, if you are comfortable with installing ram and a hard drive, etc, and really don't have a spare few hundred to buy a new laptop then extra ram and SSD drive will be a good boost. You would need to check though that your model of laptop can support a high enough amount of RAM and hard drive in order to take Windows 7. Good luck!