Upgrading oldish laptop with RAM/SSD - will it make a noticeable difference?

[stormag]

My mother has a Toshiba Satellite A200-1GS laptop (Core 2 Duo T5300 1,73GHz, intel 945PM Express chipset, 2GB RAM, 160 GB SATA 5400rpm HDD, currently with Win7 Home Premium 32-bit). She uses it mostly for googling and quite static hidden object games (or similar). She ask me to do something with her notebook, as it works sluggish (or very sluggish) in Windows and Firefox.

Do you think doubling the RAM (up to 4GB) would make the laptop perceptibly faster? Is changing W7 to 64-bit version reasonable? Some internet sources claim, that only 3GB will be available anyway (I don't know if it's true). I was also thinking about SSD (would it make a difference?), but on the other hand the machine is 10 years old, so I guess that some parts of it may soon die naturally and putting too much money in it seem to be a risky business for me (although the laptop is visually in a perfect condition, without a single scratch on the case and was always used on a notebook cooler (that was placed on a table.

Or maybe the CPU is to slow for today's (and tommorow's) internet and the RAM upgrades won't help much?

 

[USAFRet]

1. Yes, more RAM. 2GB is marginal
2. Yes, SSD
3. A full reinstall of the OS, no matter which version. Likely the current install has a lot of gunk built up.

 

[clarkjd]

My mother has a Toshiba Satellite A200-1GS laptop (Core 2 Duo T5300 1,73GHz, intel 945PM Express chipset, 2GB RAM, 160 GB SATA 5400rpm HDD, currently with Win7 Home Premium 32-bit). She uses it mostly for googling and quite static hidden object games (or similar). She ask me to do something with her notebook, as it works sluggish (or very sluggish) in Windows and Firefox.

Do you think doubling the RAM (up to 4GB) would make the laptop perceptibly faster? Is changing W7 to 64-bit version reasonable? Some internet sources claim, that only 3GB will be available anyway (I don't know if it's true). I was also thinking about SSD (would it make a difference?), but on the other hand the machine is 10 years old, so I guess that some parts of it may soon die naturally and putting too much money in it seem to be a risky business for me (although the laptop is visually in a perfect condition, without a single scratch on the case and was always used on a notebook cooler (that was placed on a table.

Or maybe the CPU is to slow for today's (and tommorow's) internet and the RAM upgrades won't help much?

On a machine with 4Gb or less ram, a 64-bit OS of ANY flavor is not needed(or recommended). Also, be aware that some older BIOSes will not support a SSD.