Hardware will this laptop last a while?

[Radiobread]

Hi, I'm going to go to college in Scotland starting in August 2015. I'm doing a course in Conservation and Countryside Management. I might need to use a CAD program or do some simple bitmap editing, and worse case scenario would be a short video in Movie Maker. I've got an office suite already and may need to multitask (i.e. Internet, Word and photo editor at the same time). These are the specs.

Intel i3 (2.5GHz)
4GB DDR3 RAM
512GB HDD (I can easily change to a solid state)
motherboard and case don't matter when I don't need to upgrade at all.

it has a long battery life and integrated graphics. Wonder if it's good for a free hand-me-down computer.

What do you guys think? Should I accept it or should I sell it on eBay for a more powerful one? Thanks.

 

[CompassNorth]

What's the specific model and what's your price range?

 

[nando]

which cad program are you using? some cad programs are very light but then something like autocad can be sluggish. solid state makes a huge difference overall.

if it's free, why are you even wondering? just use it till you can't anymore and buy a new one when you need to

 

[Tom Bombadildo]

IMO, you should probably sell that off and get some funds together for something a bit more beefy. It sort of depends on the CAD work you're going to be doing, too. I know 3D CAD work requires a somewhat beefy CPU, and quite a bit of RAM is required for CAD in general. 4GB used to be a standard, but I would argue something with 6GB+ would be a much better fit if you're going to be using this for a significant amount of time.

But it would help if we know what kind of budget/laptop model that is, so we could properly give you an estimate.

 

[Radiobread]

Excellent, thanks guys. It's an Acer laptop I know, it was a Christmas present for my brother 3 years back and now he wants a desktop because he plays games and doesn't use his PC outside the house. I'll get an SSD then, and I'll nuke the old hard drive and put win 7 on the new one. I could consider upgrading the RAM too, but you can easily kill stuff you don't need off in Processes. I'll just take it and upgrade to SSD, and see how it goes in a year's time.