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I have a eight year-old Windows laptop that was a real dog until I did two things - installed a solid-state drive and bought a new USB wireless plug-in.

The SSD sped up loading times, but for the biggest bang, upgrading to a new wireless card made a huge difference browser speed. Installation was just plugging it in and disabling the old one.

Linux, usually Fedora, is my preference for my old 64-bit x86 boxes. At some point, the motherboard Ethernet and/or wireless will no longer be supported. The work-around is to use a USB Ethernet and/or USB WiFi device to get your networking back. I've also purchased PCIe network boards to replace the no longer supported motherboard Ethernet.

A good SATA III SSD is well supported by Fedora. My fast i9 motherboard has BIOS support for the M.2 SSD (2 slots). Boots fast. I purchased a PCIe host adaptor for M.2 SSD. It works fine, but not as a boot disk without BIOS support. Some parties have solved this by using a USB boot drive, then transitioning to the M.2 SSD as the root drive.