I've thought about doing all that, but by the time I get the upgrades I want I might as well pay a bit more and buy new or a refurb. Things like the screen and dedicated gfx I can't upgrade either (laptop has no dedicated gfx).

Well, I'm doing 3D stuff at the moment with work...http://www.markmybird.org

Additionally, a lot of the sciency photo stuff I do can utilise the gpu to speed things up... For instance one thing that I tried to run on my laptop took about 3 minutes to process. There's 4800 of them to do. My personal computer that is also quite old can do one in 45 seconds, and the work laptops are about the same. Makes a bit of a difference! And that's assuming that the laptop doesn't just overheat and shut down, despite having its vents cleaned!

Having said about refurbs...I'm not sure if I would go down that route, my laptop was a refurb and pretty much from the start I can almost see why. It's made me feel that they've been refurbished for a reason now.