Thanks for the link!
For heavy work and longevity towers have it all over laptops. Build your own if you want to do it right and save some bucks.
well, so herein lies my question. Do you I just spend the money to fix my otherwise perfectly good tower? I need a hard drive and a copy of windows ( < $200 ) and then I'd want a second monitor ( < $ 200) and I have a couple slots free so I could up my ram from 8gb to 12gb for less like $30 (the other slots all have 2gb sticks so I'd just bump it up a little, rather than replace those I think) So for less than $500 I could have a perfectly good desktop up and running.
Should I just do that? I really don't "need" a laptop. My thought was it be cool for remote working (although, I've been doing fine with my chromebook) and I wouldn't need to buy another monitor to have two screens (because I have one already plus a laptop has its own screen)
What do you think?
Have you checked (using a utility like Speccy) to see if you are actually using 8GB or more of memory? That is a fair amount of memory for most common gaming and home editing.
If you have a legal copy of Windows you can upgrade to Win 7 x64 for free. FYI you have to have X64 installed to use more than 8GB of RAM.
A good SSD is fairly inexpensive.
Watch Craig's List for a second monitor and I bet you find a free or really cheap monitor in short order.
Make sure that there are drivers for your PC before performing the W10 upgrade.
If you ever want to build a new system I bet you could keep it in a reasonable price range...