Misc. Questions about laptop

Hi,

So my laptop is back from dead.

Backstory:

I ave 5750g Acer (hate it), i5 2nd gen, nvidia 540m.

Would overheat etc, one day, I opened to clean it, when closing it back, messed up, display wouldnt turn on.. gave up on it, been lying there for a few months (been using office laptop for stuff since, no dedicated gfx card, could play games/install either due to admin rights)

Anyway, had time to kill, got my old laptop opened and repairs, they even put some chinese thermal paste, I wanted to use a branded one, but yea, didnt notice, they had done it already)...anyway, all repairs and clean up costed me $18 and tada! Laptop temperatures are very good now, i can actually feel room temperature air out of the vents as opposed to nothing but heat radiating in the past.

While 540m isnt the latest or the greatest, it'll do for F2P games and blizzard games.

Now my question is Acer/OEM drivers are at 298xx, latest at 353xx, should I install latest notebook drivers from Nvidia? or should i not bother?

Any other recommendations? I plan to buy a cooling pad.

This laptop is around 4-5 years old. It hasnt been formatted in 3-4 years.

This is plan of action:

0. Did SMART scan on HD to see how things are, came back positive.

1. Chkdsk - done - fixed some stuff, performance appears to be much better.

2. Defrag

3. Take out optical caddy, throw in my current 500 gb hdd there using optical hdd caddy. Throw in an SSD in hdd caddy. Should dramatically improve performance and SSD can be used in future as well whenever i plan to buy new laptop.

4. Buy cooling pad..any recommendations with marked temperature difference? Can also be used in future.

5. Use Nvidia driver instead of old oem driver? Does this improve performance?

6. SSD, in optical caddy.

OR, to hell with all this, just buy a new laptop.

tldr: Need your feedback on plan of actions and anything else you guys may recommend.

Thanks.

Edited by Shahenshah, 02 August 2015 - 12:31 PM.