Jim Rossman: How old is too old for a laptop?

I spent some time with a friend last week trying to see what we could do to make her laptop faster.

She has a 6-year-old HP laptop that has really bogged down. It takes forever to start up, and then it is slow to respond to any input.

Her laptop has a sixth-generation Intel Core i5 processor, 12 gigabytes of RAM and a 500-gigabyte spinning hard drive.

We sat down and started it up, and when it finally presented us with a desktop, it was obvious the hard drive was working hard — it was audible.

The reason I mentioned the hard drive was a spinning drive is because there are two kinds of storage for your computer.

Traditionally, hard drives were spinning platters, much like vinyl albums. The platter spins fast, and the information is read or written to the platter by a head that moves over the platter much like a needle plays an album on a turntable.

The other type of storage is called a solid-state drive, which is made up of memory chips instead of a platter and has no moving parts.

Solid-state drives are much faster than spinning drives.

The spinning hard drive works pretty well until the platter starts filling up. When the platter is almost full, the data gets fragmented. If you need to save a file and there’s not a big-enough spot on the platter for it to live, the computer will break up the file into smaller pieces and store it wherever there is a bit of space.

The heads need to quickly move all over the platters to read the data, which doesn’t sound like it would take a long time, but it does.

A utility in Windows called Task Manager will show you how your system is utilizing RAM or the hard drive. In my friend’s case, the hard-drive utilization was staying at 100%.

We deleted some apps she no longer needed, which helped. She could also upgrade her spinning drive to a solid-state drive, but she decided it was time for a new laptop with a solid-state drive and a newer processor. If her laptop was a bit newer, I would still recommend upgrading, but 6 years old is ancient in computing terms.

She asked what she should be looking for in the way of specs when she goes laptop shopping.

I told her she wanted a more current processor, like an 11th-generation Intel Core i5 or i7 CPU with 8 gigabytes of RAM (16 gigabytes is better) and a 256-gigabyte (or larger) solid-state drive.

Those specs should be good for at least the next three or four years, which is how long I’d suggest keeping a laptop.