Consider upgrading to 10 from 8.1 on your wife's laptop if it supports it for better performance.
Consider upgrading to 10 from 8.1 on your wife's laptop if it supports it for better performance.
Your wife uses an ASUS Q301LA laptop for everyday tasks like browsing, emails, shopping, and writing. You're upgrading her HDD to an SSD to boost performance, but the system feels sluggish. You're considering switching to Windows 10 and wondering if an update would help. You're also asking about essential software needed for basic operation without ASUS or Microsoft features. Since the laptop lacks an optical drive, you'll need to download drivers from ASUS directly. The processor is an i5-4200U at 1.6GHz with 4GB RAM, and you're thinking about a 240GB SSD upgrade. You mentioned the touch screen isn't used, so you might want to revert to Windows 7 and remove the screen. Let me know if you need further clarification!
In my view, Windows 8 is the least favorable version, while Vista seemed preferable to me.
Vista had some issues at first but improvements came later, and they handled things well overall.
Don't rush to upgrade the operating system; evaluate your existing hardware. Search for manuals and details about it to assess compatibility. If compatible, determine the extent of the compatibility. Also, check if others have used similar machines with comparable hardware.