Is it possible to make my old Dell Inspiron 6000 fast?

I have a 5 year old laptop. Its a 15.4 Dell Inspiron 6000. I like it a lot because the build is very sturdy and i am very comfortable with this laptop. Its specs however are Pentium 4 Processor, 60GB 5400rpm and 2gb ram. It use to be 512mb only but i bought memory and the max is 2gb and it got faster but still is extremely slow. I have formatted this laptop many times and everytime i do, it gets faster but slows down after i use it for a few weeks.

I bought a new laptop that is 15.5, a sony vaio eb series with i3-370m processor, 320gb hard drive 7200rpm and 4gb ram. However, right now it has touchpad problems and i will either return it or have technician to come and fix it. The sony LOOKS VERY NICE but i prefer my dell over it. Its really sturdy and well built. Touchpad is right in the middle and no numberpad unlike my sony.

But is there away way to get this dell laptop real fast or is that impossible b/c my laptop is pentium 4 processor. i done the defrag, virus scan etc but is there something i can do to make this computer run faster? I wouldn't mind spending a couple hundred dollars to make it faster because i like this laptop so much compared to my new sony vaio. I do know however that 2GB ram is the max for this dell inspiron 6000. Would buying an SSD be a bad idea or would it be waste of money? I also heard that SSD might not be compatible with these old laptops.
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I've got an 8200 that's more that 8 years old that I keep going for its UXGA screen so I understand your position.

I'm not sure if there are any PATA SSDs that could be used in your 6000. I doubt it, they would be very expensive and would make less difference that you might expect.

If your hard drive is more than 80% full that will slow the machine down

Nothing else significant can be upgraded. If the machine slows down after a few weeks that suggests your installing some bloat - programs that slow the machine down. I'm guessing you're running XP so you could try some sofware tuning; removing unnecessary processes etc.

Of course there is one way of making your machine faster that won't cost you anything except your time; a lightweight Linux installation would make it fly, but that might not be something you'd want to try.

 

Please don't cross post. You already have a thread in hardware. Closed.