In article , Bill W
wrote:

But... Windows still sucks. I think. Repeated crashes and forced
restarts, especially when installing software, but at other random
times, also.

while windows has its issues, there shouldn't be any crashes at all,
repeated or not.

At the same time, this laptop is not supported for
anything past Win 7 - no chipset updates at all.

that could be why you are having crashes.

So if you do have
some interest in trying the same thing, check to see what OS your
laptop supports. I think you can force Win 10 onto just about anything
that's not an antique, but you should expect problems. Mine seem to
have diminished considerably. Maybe Windows fixes itself. And if
you're happy with an earlier version of Windows, an SSD will almost
certainly be a huge improvement.

swapping an hd for an ssd has zero effect on the choice of os.

if whatever is on there now works, it will work after the swap, just
faster. it's just 'another sata drive'.