Hey guys,

I'm at a crossroads in my gaming career and I'd like to get some of your input on my options. I own a four years old Lenovo Y470 which has been a good little soldier running all the games I wanted on reasonable settings until now. At a meager 900$ its specs are : Nvidia GeForce GT 550M, Intel Core i7-2630QM CPU @ 2.00GHz, 8 GB RAM.

Sadly these won't cut it for the next wave of fantasy RPGs I crave so much, such as Dragon Age : Inquisition, The Witcher 3 and the upcoming Elder Scrolls VI. I don't game as much as I used to but I don't want to miss these particular releases. Trouble is, a powerful enough laptop would cost me around 1300$ at the very least, which is a lot for a college student. I must act now because my machine has been slowing down a lot lately with a total boot time of around 4 minutes, I think the HDD might have been damaged during my long daily commute. The USB ports have also started shutting down randomly about once a week and the wireless network adapter had to be replaced with an external one.

My options are thus:

• Immediately buy the most affordable gaming laptop able to run my anticipated games, namely the Sager NP8651. Live a monastic lifestyle for a few months to absorb the expense.
• Replace the HDD in my Lenovo with a 500 GB SSD for the time being, considering how I played nothing but Heroes of the Storm and Skyrim for the past two months. Wait for the Sager's price to fall down.
• Buy a 300$ productivity chromebook. Build a gaming desktop myself, which including the monitor and keyboard would cost me nearly as much as the Sager. Weep for my wallet yet again.

What would you do in my shoes? I'm leaning towards option 2 but I don't know if the SSD will make my old laptop tolerable for 8 months, the minimum IMO to justify the 180$ expense. I also have to admit that between grad school, the gym, my girlfriend and work I actively try to game less.

Start new I'd say, if you can afford it.

Sounds like your laptop has other problems unrelated to your HDD, I wouldn't bother with the SSD

Try a clean install of windows and start saving up for a new system.

I don't know why your USB ports are shutting down, but if it's hardware related at the USB port (e.g. they're not gripping USB cables properly) then options 1 or 3 are attractive.

If it's software related then things may improve with an OS rebuild, and looking at option 2 I can vouch for the fact that an SSD makes a huge difference to bootup times/general performance and a 500GB SSD doesn't need to cost as much as a Chromebook. I found one on Newegg for $339 bucks but it looks like you can get them for under $200 (I'm not from the US so I don't have lots of US store bookmarks to make it quick to compare). Your laptop has a much better spec than mine, I bought my current laptop in 2009 and upgraded to an SSD because the boot time was slow, it was in the order of a few minutes like yours but when the SSD went in it was about 30 seconds. Having installed a few things that needed to run at startup it stabilised at about 40 seconds. Even with a couple of OS upgrades and stuff like SQL server installed later, it still boots quickly and is responsive to use comfortably. In your position you'd still be able to play your old games as before but hopefully they would load quicker too. Also bear in mind that you could re-use or sell the SSD fairly easily.

One thing I should mention, when I did the replacement in my laptop the HDD had glued on rubber spacers (factory fitted) to push it against the case to stop it moving about (the bay is slightly larger) and they also allow for airflow. The replacement SSD didn't have those but was the same size as the HDD so I cut a pencil eraser into pieces of the right size and have had no problems at all.

build the desktop.