Apparently the latest thing is the .
could try this has 3 x usb 2.0 so its talkative and cheap
Back up everything she needs ... wipe the system ....
Assuming this 4 yr old lappy was a middle of the road model, I cant think that it will be outdated.
As Stag intimated it might be full of crap so a wipe n restore is a good start. Then I would have a look at a memory upgrade, ever so easy and a budget of about £50 quid. Another 70 or 80 will buy you a solid state drive upgrade but I wouldnt bother. Have a look at the crucial website for the bits.
I would run XP rather than later hungrier versions of windows.
Recycling, the acceptable word for parsimony.
Flower, I like the look of the Samsung Note myself, just as a net browser I can use watching the telly as much as anything, and the stylus looks good for the art and design stuff your daughter wants it for depending how good the software is that makes use of it, but for proper productivity type applications I doubt they're the best choice, and if it's the kind of propriety closed system I expect it to be they're probably not very future prof. I would avoid a netbook for the same reason. Good for lightweight tasks but I wouldn't expect any heavy-duty processing from them, not all that future proof again. Quite a scathing review of the Samsung actually btw, which is one of the few I've been able to find amid the generally glowing reports.
As far as the art and design requirement goes I doubt your daughter's gonna be using anything seriously processor heavy like Photoshop on her old machine, but even a 4 year old laptop should be able to run Photoshop CS2 at least. My aging Core 2 Duo at home and an equally old AMD Athlon 64 X2 at work cope pretty well with basic editing anyways, even with only 2 gig of RAM in it. Cheap upgrades to memory, maybe a faster / bigger hard drive assuming it's a pretty standard Sata II 2.5" HD that's in it, clean re-install of XP to get rid of the random processes she's likely accumulated over the years in her start-up. Could have a look at msconfig actually, see what's starting with the OS. In XP: Start > Run > msconfig > startup tab, Win7: Start > msconfig in Search programs and files box > startup tab. Likely to be all kinds of crap you don't need to have running in background / system tray you can just disable at startup, recover any performance hit they were causing. Give it a good clean with Malware Bytes or Spybot or something too, see if that helps before reformatting the drive with a new install.
Have a look at for and components for upgrading the existing laptop. £400 will buy you a really quite decent laptop with dual-core Intel i5 CPUs, decent sized hard drive, shitloads of RAM and more ports and networking than you could shake a dirty stick at from a better quality manufacturer on there, no problem. Cheap as chips, great support, massive range to suit any budget, cheap delivery costs. Use them for all my bits and bobs cos they're pretty local to me, but mail order service just as good. Got a decent replacement PSU delivered just this week from them.
Can you post the model number of the HP laptop flower??
Like others have said it should not be outdated to the point of failing to handle everything a student needs.
The Samsung Note will probably be outclassed in every respect other than 'cool' by the old HP, which is probably suffering from 'bloatware' (unnecessary background programmes) and a lack of routine maintenance and servicing.
If the HP will do the job you can let your daughter decide on the Samsung purchase, it might be a good way for you to teach her a lesson; the premium price of the very latest tech does not usually offer good value for money ;)
I think the tablet should be fine, but she'll definitely need a wireless printer to use it with it, and if she's going into halls it'll need to be able to connect directly, because you might not be able to connect them through a hub. It's worth checking whether her room will have a good wifi signal, because my halls had terrible wifi, so you had to connect via ethernet cable, and that'd be useless for a tablet.
Some indispensable apps for the tablet:-
dropbox (free)
polaris office (free) & compatable with MS Office
hp e-print (free)
A couple of indispensables here flower for my iPad.
For printing to a legacy printer, FingerPrint2 on a PC
For free apps,
For TV on line,
There are others of course, but for a resourceful young flower it shouldn't be a problem finding them.
There's not an 'app' to mimic Turbo Lister available for android yet.
The only way to do it is create the list on your pc then view the results when they've been uploaded on the ebay app:-
