One thing to find out is how much memory your MB can recognize. I had 4gb in it but it could only use 3gigs no matter how much you put in. That’s the Bios limit on some older machines. If it will see 8gb, that’s all good. Add on boards can get you where you want to go. You can even put a Hard drive card in to get your DVD in. How many slots do you have left and are they all PCIe? another thing to look at is how fast is your network running? I went from 10mbs to 300 mbs and my network card ran about 50mbs until I put the new machine on the network. Then it ran 250mbs. That will load things much faster even with slower machine. You need a gigabit card for that.
My OP indicated that the RAM max in this machine is 16 GB. (Per Crucial scanner). Since then I went ahead and added 4 GB for a total of 8 GB.
I suspect more RAM won’t help speed much, once the SSD is in as the boot / programs drive, but it might reduce writes to the SSD?
All the machines on Ethernet show a nominal network speed of 100 Mbps (limited by the router, I’d guess). Actual Internet speed (per Ookla’s Speedtest) on THIS machine just tested @ 41 Mbps download, 49 Mbps upload. I also just checked our fastest machine: 80 Mbps download, 73 Mbps upload. (Initial speeds are higher on both, then slow a bit part way into the test. I believe we are paying for a nominal 100 Mbps - so, “speed not guaranteed”, the result is ok, and plenty fast for anything we will do.)
Cold boot-up is presently 57 seconds (as long as no update “stuff” is going on — it took forever to get the machine fully Windows 10 updated.) There appears to be some Startup garbage from Acronis running — I made the mistake* of taking PNY’s advice to use a free version of True Image for the SSD cloning. So, I need to kill that.
*Long story - I ended up using Macrium Reflect.
The HDD is now cloned to the SSD, so, now it’s time to make the swap. :-)
Really, it may be that the single PCIe slot is this machine’s biggest limitation, for what we want out of it, but, at least @ present it is open. Since I’ll want to get a USB 3 hub to plug in the back anyway (only 2x USB 3.0 and 2x USB 2.0 ports on the machine, and the mouse and keyboard are USB, I can likely run the DVD player / writer off a USB 3.0 to mini-Sata adaptor cable fed through the back. Huge speed is not needed there...