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I own this laptop for 4 years more or less and it wasn't always charming but lately I had to work with Xamarin in Visual Studio and I got to realize that it is really slow.
Right now I have a 6GB Ram and will probably add a couple more to get 8GB. Will it make a significant difference ?
What others upgrades would you advise me to improve it's performance ? I would very much appreciate if you could specifically say what new parts should i get.
The biggest performance e increase would be to replace the hdd with an SSD. Any SATA SSD should work - I like Samsung EV8x0 series (where x is the generation, it won't matter too much which gen). The size you get will depend on how full your hdd is and budget, but a 250 or 500 gig should suffice.
Increasing memory will help significantly, but will slightly reduce the battery life. An SSD will likely help more (because it reduces swap times and greatly decreases file access and write times). Doing both will help more.
Not much else to upgrade on a laptop in terms of performance.
As davidgo stated, the best upgrade you can do on a notebook for that kind of work is the SSD, it will help a lot when working with large projects, apart from the general responsiveness. It can also help in scenarios where RAM memory is just barely not enough for what you are doing, since paging is much faster on flash memory.
Updrading to 8GB is also advisable, but i suspect doing that alone will not make a big difference. I would upgrade this alongside with the SSD, since DDR3L memory is quite affordable this days. You can check your memory usage in the Task Manager, unless is near 100% most of the time you are not limited by that.
Unfortunately there is not much more you can do, since the vast majoriry of current notebooks (yours included) have the CPU soldered, the other major upgrade point for your work.
