new laptop

Hello everybody, currently I have a late 2010 macbook, with 2G of ram and 250 gb. Im looking to upgrade to a new laptop. I would like something that can run 720p and 1080p vids on youtube with no buffering, also I just surf the internet a lot, (like 70% of the time). In addition I once in a blue moon edit a video. Lastly I do light gaming (on avarage 3-4 hours a week). The games That I play are SC2, Team Fortress 2, civilization 5, and minecraft. Minecraft and civilization run okish, but tf2 and sc2 buffer a lot. I'm not looking for mind blowing gaming experience, but enought to run the games reasonably. My budget is 1400-1500 and I really can not go higher than that (so only 13"). Thanks a lot in advance.

Well, crap, I accidentally edited the wrong post and lost the info I had here.

OK good to know, will there be a major improvement over my current laptop, or only a bit better.

dantheman5398 said:

OK good to know, will there be a major improvement over my current laptop, or only a bit better.

Click to expand...

The biggest issue with your current laptop is the lack of memory. A 2010 is pretty new! Generally, I'll get 3-5 years out of a laptop. I bet that if you were to max out the memory in your current laptop you would see a BIG difference. If you were to upgrade the hard drive to an SSD, you would see more difference. The investment for BOTH would not be very much, esp. relative to the cost of a new machine. Consider:

256GB SSD drive for under $200:
http://www.crucial.com/store/partspe...LE=CT256V4SSD2

8GB RAM kit for under $60:
Other World Computing - 8566DDR3S8GP Item Not Found

So, for $260 or less, you can set your machine up to SMOKE IT in its current configuration.

I would definitely recommend doing this, and seeing if the performance is satisfactory before dropping $1400+ on a new machine to replace a 2 year old machine. Give it 6 months and if you're still not happy, you can always use the SSD in or with your replacement machine.

Now - you will likely see a big difference between a new machine as above and your current machine, but a huge component of that difference will be because it has 8GB and your current one has 2GB. You can fix that issue for not much money.

Thank a lot but neither of the links work. I don't really know how to install stuff like that (im a huge computer n00b), would my local computer renissance do it. Also if I switch out my hardrive would I need to copy everything to it, does it replace it, or just add to it. Thanks a lot for all of your help. I really appreciate it. Also just so you know I have the macbook, not the macbook pro. It was the 2.4 GHz intel core 2 duo white one.

Also if I were just to upgrade the ram, would it still be a big difference (I.E. less buffering on videos and less loading time on games?) Because I just looked at a video and it seems very simple. I guess my question would be stock MB vs MB with ram vs MB with ram and SSD. wold it be 1X vs 1.4X vs 1.8X or 1X vs 2X vs 3X. How much better would the upgrades be vs each other. Thanks a lot for all the help.

Agree with anynamewilldo. That's a pretty new machine to be considering replacing. I have a 2010 MBP 15" , 2.66 GHZ i7, 8 GB RAM and 500 GB 7200 RPM HDD. The only thing I would do to make it faster is to add a SSD.

You need more memory and a faster drive and you won't believe how much faster the machine is.