AWKWARD ZOMBIE

Extension syncing is nothing more than adding the extensions' ID from the Chrome Web Store to your profile (so you can't sync extensions from any other source) and nothing more, so if you kept your extensions' settings, it means your data was never really lost in the first place.
A thing specific to Chromium/Blink-based browsers is that they create a new folder every time there is an update, so if the most recent version breaks stuff, it can default to the previous one. Though I think this does not apply to AppData, where I assume most of your data is stored (haven't used Chrome/ium in nearly two years so I'm not quite sure about that).

I do tend to bring around my laptop for long trips, yeah. That, and there's nowhere to put a desktop in my home.
As far as things go now, I don't really need to replace my laptop and I'm fine not being able to play games on it for the time being because I tend to play on other systems. However, there are some games I bought on steam years ago that can't be played on this computer, and I'd like to be able to maybe play them some day.

What are the games in question? With a general idea of how intensive they are, shouldn't be too hard to find a well-priced laptop to run them.

To give you a good idea of my laptop now, I tried playing Bioshock (the first one) on it, and it froze up and basically spat it back out at me. The laptop is completely serviceable in other points; just not video games. I'm sure there are performance issues in other areas that i could clear up but I really don't have good enough knowledge to fix them other than really basic stuff.

actually that reminds me I ought to defrag my hard disk again

Defrags generally don't do anything good for harddisks nowadays. You are better off clearing up un-needed programs and services as well as moving files to an external disk.

The slowdown you are noticing is most likely because each and every program you use are getting increasingly complex because most computers are becoming faster which allows the newer features. An old computer will not be able to run the newer programs as well as before.

I guess I should be thankful that nothing has happened to completely break my laptop in the 4 years that I've owned it, but there are some annoyances I haven't been able to fix (like not being able to complete certain updates since 2010.)

When was the last time you reinstalled Windows?

I uh...never actually reinstalled it?

Yeah, you should have reinstalled it at least twice during those 4 years, might have resolved lots of the issues you have with your current laptop, and ensured better performance overall.

To reinstall windows, you'll obviously need a copy of it. Did you laptop come with some sort of "limited license" or something? Usually, when you buy a laptop it'll come with a program to burn a backup windows CD, but you can only burn one. If you never burnt a CD, you should be able to do it now. If you did burn the CD or if your laptop didn't include the feature, then you'll probably need to buy a new copy of widows, which can unfortunately get pretty expensive.

It can also be on a partition in the hard-drive itself.

You don't need to buy a Windows installation disc, only the license you got with your laptop matters. You can download a legal copy from Digital River (official Windows distributor), burn that onto a disc and use it to reinstall Windows with the license you have. No need to bother with OEM partition bullshit, I removed all of that from my laptop when I reinstalled Windows.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/windows ... uages.html

Anyway, I believe GA originally asked for help with buying a new laptop. Are you just looking for sites that offer customized laptops? I know Toshiba offers that with some models at least.

How comparable are low-model i7s and high model i5s?

I ask because my friend's laptop has a dual-core i7 and I was curious about how good that actually is. Obviously an i7 would be impressive in a desktop, but what about this 3rd or 2nd(?) generation i7 compared to, for example, my fourth general quad core i5 or a desktop version of the same i7?

Well, my i5-2500K does fantastic for pretty much every game I've ever tried and has never gotten above 30% CPU (that's being generous) for anything.

You can't really directly compare laptop and desktop CPUs but I have an i7-2670QM (I'm still impressed I could find one in a 600€ laptop) and it performs very competitively. It was quite a bit faster than my desktop CPU for a full year, too. It scores a 5.0 in Cinebench R11.5 while the i5-2500k scores a 5.4 at stock and the i5-3570k scores 6.0.