No it's definitively not an outrageous amount of money. I have a 3 year old Thinkpad T61p with a still decent Core 2 Duo and 4 GB of ram. After three years it

No it's definitively not an outrageous amount of money. I have a 3 year old Thinkpad T61p with a still decent Core 2 Duo and 4 GB of ram. After three years it felt kind of slow so I had two options: 1) Buy a SSD for 250 Euro or 2) buy a completely new laptop for > 1000 Euro. I went the first route and after working with the SSD for half a year I'm pretty sure that an expensive new laptop with a traditional hard drive would not have resulted in such a tremendous speedup as the SSD did. So please don't think of the 200$ for an SSD as "these 200$ will buy me a new hard drive" but instead think of this investment as "these 200$ will buy me an awesome new computer".