Agree - an SSD is by far the largest performance upgrade you can do. I'd buy a little more downspec laptop if price is an issue and spend extra on replacing the HDD with an SSD - a $500 laptop with an SSD addition will outperform a $1500 laptop without one convincingly in general use, unless you have a specialized processor intensive task you plan on doing like transcoding video. My minimum laptop spec has an SSD and 4GB of RAM, and that's about it - even low end i3 processors are very powerful.

modified on Thursday, September 15, 2011 4:16 PM