yeah buy a new laptop, most laptops cant actually have the cpu upgraded, those that can have a rather limited selection that you can choose from.

if the laptop is 4 - 5 years old even given the slim chance you can actually upgrade the proccesor at all wouldnt be worth it as any upgrade would be quite outdated any way.

the ram will improve things but not a lot tbh, a reformat and clean install of xp would make the most difference.

Can you upgrade the CPU in a laptop. i know in mine that ya cant, its part of the board

My girlfriend has an old HP laptop which we want to upgrade. She likes mine to much and hates how slow hers is. Now i know 'ish' what Ram i want (2 x 2gig) but not clued up on any brands. We also want to upgrade the processor to something a lot quicker - here i do not have a clue whats good and whats not (i have a 2.8ghz dual core 2 in my laptop and this seems to be pretty good so something similar) and what we can upgrade to given the Laptop is about 4 or 5 years old. The current processor according to Intel website is a 1.7ghz Pentium M 740 which even i know is old.
So what i am really after is what ram brands to stick to and avoid and what CPU to go for given the age of the laptop - the laptop will be running x64 Vista - i would love any suggestions