Is it worth upgrading this old laptop's ram / swap to an SSD? If so, have q's on how to benchmark speeds, and what would/wouldn't work!

I guess I'm wondering if, upon increased ram and a swap to an ssd, what the next bottleneck would be (and how badly it'd limit this laptop) I don't mind messing with it since it's HDD failed ('Click of Death'), it's now running off a thumbdrive with a persistent xubuntu OS and does nothing more than feed an always-on weather radar display on my wall, however I've got another machine I can setup for that duty and, in removing that broken hdd I browsed Newegg and ebay and just couldn't believe how cheap the upgradeable parts were - $20 or less for a 2.5" ssd, $10 for 4gb ram, and it seems fully 'plug&play' so I can't help but think it makes sense to just spend $30 to turn an otherwise useless (now that I've got a suitable replacement for my weather-radar-machine) laptop into something 'functional' (unsure what I'd do with it, either gift it if I find someone in need otherwise craigslist it) The machine itself is this, it's old but if it's got 4gb/ssd it'd be fine for basic-use, am guessing that the CPU would be the bottleneck if I upgraded the ram from 2-->4gb, and the drive from HDD to SSD, hoping for any insight! And whether I'm missing something here, so far as I can tell here those are the only 2 upgrades to make, couldn't even guess at a 3rd actually w/o overkill like changing stuff on the board itself which is unlikely to be worthwhile for this, would sooner leave it as my weather-only machine than have to open it up, I'm able to do the ram (ddr2 I'm sure) and the ssd (unsure if the plugs are homogeneous but will see!) by just removing panels on the bottom of the machine, very simple!

Thanks for any insight on this one!!

Submitted October 30, 2017 at 10:20AM by neovngr http://ift.tt/2zhCwAm