Keep Old Macbook Pro or buy newer one?

I have an early 2008 17" macbook pro. It has a fried logic board. Second time its happened.
I believe its the 2.5GHZ and it currently has 4gb of ram. It also has a bit of a dent in the screen and body, so its not in GREAT shape, but still going strong.

I am curious if I should keep this thing, get the OWC 480GB Mercury Electra 6G SSD for $300 and pay the Apple $300 Fix Anything Deal again (it's what i did last time a few years ago) and get the OWC 6gb ram upgrade

or

On craigslist I found a MBP 2011 for $600 - 2.4GHZ i5 500GB Sata HDD 4gb RAM.

I personally would not repair it. It is getting long in the tooth. I also would not buy any used laptop that I could not inspect from a private seller. I prefer refurbs from the Apple store if buying used, but that is more expensive (but safe).

Not worth repairing. Replacement logic boards are too expensive.

- Nick

I would not spent $600 + on a 6 year old laptop...

Pro

I agree, not really worth spending much money to fix. I have the same MacBookPro laptop and it is starting to give me some problems now. It won't install the Yosemite beta and doesn't even want to install Maverick either. While it runs just fine on Lion there will be no way to run the new 64bit stuff that will be coming out over the next few years so upgrading won't really be an option.

For me anyway a new MackBookAir isn't acceptable, so one of the MacBookPros is about the only choice. You can get one of the low end ones for about $1000 to $1200 that will at least give you something that will take you a few years more into the future. Just remember to get 8 gig of ram as requirements for decent performance keep going up. Don't worry to much about drive size as you can get a Toshiba 1T USB3 drive for about $69.00 that works great.