My mother’s laptop has been running as fast as a turtle on a snail going uphill for a long time now. Everything has been done to it, including formatting it and installing another, less cumbersome OS, but nothing improves. I have an HHD available, I have done some tests and it does work.
Would changing the hard drive do any good?
SSDs <1TB are competitive, if not outright beating, HDDs. You don’t need to double the budget anymore. It might not be the fastest SSD at the cheap range, but the slowest SSD is still going to be faster than any (consumer grade) HDDs