I've enjoyed my return to radioi monitoring, after 5+ years of inactivity, and
have had no difficulty getting my Perseus and Elad FDM-S2 SDRs up and
running.

My recent vintage Microsoft Surface laptops are great for basic tasks such
as email, watching videos, surfing, and word processing. The Surface does not 
work well to run SDR Console and other contril software due to a lack of multiple
ports and a smaller screen.

So far I have been receiving what I consider "OK" performance from a 10 year
old I5 laptop, with 16gb of ram, and an SSD. From the collective experience
of list members, what might I gain by updating the laptop?

better performance when you use wideband sdr

as wider the bw as more data the cpu has to work with in a given time

if you want to stay at the laptop area then look for a unit with additional nvidia card (either a mobile workstation or a gamer laptop) cause the nvidia card can be used as "coprocessor" for the main cpu in sdr console (even a small nvidia card will help)...next is ... some laptops have only an i5 2 core while other have a 4 or 6 or even 8 core cpu

so a more modern laptop with a bigger cpu plus nvidia card .. that is the way to go if you want more performance ... more screens and ports?? go for a laptop with docking station

if you only use narrowband sdr then you can use your i5 as long as it works (and has enough cpu power left over to run this or that digimode in parallel)

dg9bfc sigi