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?
I’m a bit late to the party but if you’re still running a machine with BIOS rather than uefi You should definitely look into spinrite 6.1 from grc.net written by Steve Gibson who is nothing short of a genius when it comes to low level hdd optimisation. (7 will support uefi) if your machine has legacy support you might be able to get it booted as well. He has all sorts of utilities including ones to make sure you can spinrite will boot on your machine before purchase
(Shields up ring any bells to the oldies, same guy)