<p>So the son left his 3 year old dead macbook here at home after taking off for a distant part of the world with his new macbook pro. Is it worthwhile to hold on to this and replace the hard drive, for a home backup/travel computer? Seems such a waste to just recycle it. I have a perfectly good newer laptop myself.</p>
<p>Like LakeWashington said - if your laptop generally does what you want then don’t replace it just because it happens to be 4 years old. It could easily last another 4 years or more. Almost all laptop batteries will get to a point where they don’t hold much of a charge at which point they can simply be replaced. The hard disk, especially in a laptop (because of the movement and jarring) is the most likely thing to fail but that’ll happen even on a newer laptop. I don’t think the age of your laptop justifies its replacement.</p>
<p>It doesn’t make sense to replace the laptop just because the latest iTunes won’t work on it but it also doesn’t make sense that iTunes works with all kinds of Windows OSs but not Apple’s own! </p>
<p>Can you use your D’s Windows laptop just to do your iTunes? </p>
<p>Another option - buy a netbook for around the same as replacing your battery and upgrading your OS (maybe) and you’ll have a new small, lightweight computer to run iTunes and other things and you can still use your older laptop.</p>