Toshiba Satellite L15-S104 CPU, RAM, HDD upgrade questions

Hello guys,
I've recently got this old laptop to play with and it is currently super slow.
It's specs are default, which it was bought with:

Intel Celeron M 350 1.3 GHz CPU, Socket 478 (Intel 852GM)
256MB DDR-333 RAM
40 GB 4200RPM PATA/eIDE hard drive (not exactly sure, what brand, though)
etc.

I'm firstly thinking of upgrading it's memory, but it seems to be possible to also upgrade it's processor and hard drive, as they're sold at comparatively low prices in my local area. I've also already done some research on the compatibility of the cpus on this particular motherboard, so here are some questions:
Some cheap (3-8$) celerons such as M370 or M380 are available, so would it be much of an increase in performance to upgrade the current cpu with the latter ones?
And the hard drive, I might be considering upgrading to a more capacious one, with 5400rpm, but it's already a financial question, whether it's worth spending ~30$ for a, for instance, 80GB Samsung 5400rpm model or not? I mean, again, would it help the laptop to be more speedy with 1GB of ram already installed?

Thanks in advance!

 

Short answer is it's not worth upgrading; sure you can boost it's performance a good chunk by changing the processor, adding more ram and getting a faster hard drive, but even with all those updates it will be considerably slower than even a cheap $200 netbook while costing you a decent bit.

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I won't be using it as my main pc, so I think, why not? imho, spending something like 10-20$ or even 50$ including a hard drive for a bit of an upgrade would be by far the best option. Though I'm still pretty unsure if I need to upgrade all of the mentioned parts. Would appreciate help with the second question
Thanks for your opinion, anyway

 

My order of upgrades if you want to go ahead anyway is OS> ram> processor> hard drive.

Going with a lean Linux OS like Lubuntu will make the computer run a lot faster, with and without upgrades.

The more ram you have, the less you need to use the hard drive for most tasks, so if you can put in something like 768MB or 1 GB you should notice a decent performance boost there.

According to Intel the highest clocked Celeron that is supported by the chipset is the Celeron m 390, after ram and OS, this will make the most impact in terms of performance.

The last upgrade I would consider is the hard drive; not because hard drives are the least beneficial, but in your case, you only have access to used, marginally faster drives that cost a lot more than other upgrades.

That being said, if you decide to grab a hard drive, try to make sure it's in good condition, and you'll generally get better performance with higher capacity and/or higher rpm drives.

Last thing you should also check is that the laptop is clean inside and not overheating as overheating drastically lowers performance; you should also consider reapplying thermal paste to the processor whether or not you upgrade it.

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This guy is spot on.

 

Thanks Sanjiro, great help! It's a shame how could I forget the OS question.
In fact, the laptop is in a mint shape, as if I have just opened it and peeled off all the stickers, used very rarely, that's why I'm alot into restoring it. Looks even better than my 1-year old HP

 

You may want to read the whole thread, but this post sums it up for me:

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...x-r2-ssd-920xm-gpu-upgrade-2.html#post8757817

 

I totally agree with that opinion, just, in my case, spending additional ~15$ on RAM upgrade won't make my wallet cry
Btw, just installed ubuntu, the laptop is considerably faster now.