Firstly, upgrade from HDD to SSD. For random access, these are commonly 100–500× as fast, and even for block I/O 10–30×, and that will concretely speed up startup by a large fraction of that ratio, quite apart from speeding up other things later.
Once you get used to modern SSDs, as almost everyone on this site will be, I think you lose track of just how bad HDDs are, to run the OS from. My wife’s ten-year-old work laptop takes well over five minutes to boot up, log in, start a browser, load something like Gmail, and settle down so the disk is idle and it’s running as smoothly as it ever will; and sure, the aging i5-4300M CPU doesn’t help¹; but I suspect spending less than a thousand rupees replacing its HDD with even the cheapest and smallest SSD (acceptable capacity, in this case) might cut that to a minute, and spending a few thousand for a faster one would speed it up to below a minute.
(One fun thing about SSDs is that, overall, bigger is faster. At some points in history, for some makes, it’s been almost as simple as “twice as large, twice as fast”. This is, of course, a gross simplification, but I think not too far off.)
Secondly, if you have less than 8GB of RAM, get more. Beyond that it varies depending on what you’re using it for, but up to at least that point, it’s just an unconditional improvement.
—⁂—
¹ PassMark lists single/multi scores for the Intel Core i5-4300M of around 1,700/3,000. Some units in recent generations from approximately the same segment: the Intel Core i5-1334U scoring 3,350/13,400, and the Intel Core Ultra 5 125H scoring 3,450/21,500. This basically means an absolute minimum of 2× speedup on any workload, and for most it’s more like 3–4×. There’s a lot of difference in ten years of CPU.
Firstly, upgrade from HDD to SSD. For random access, these are commonly 100–500× as fast, and even for block I/O 10–30×, and that will concretely speed up startup by a large fraction of that ratio, quite apart from speeding up other things later.
Once you get used to modern SSDs, as almost everyone on this site will be, I think you lose track of just how bad HDDs are, to run the OS from. My wife’s ten-year-old work laptop takes well over five minutes to boot up, log in, start a browser, load something like Gmail, and settle down so the disk is idle and it’s running as smoothly as it ever will; and sure, the aging i5-4300M CPU doesn’t help¹; but I suspect spending less than a thousand rupees replacing its HDD with even the cheapest and smallest SSD (acceptable capacity, in this case) might cut that to a minute, and spending a few thousand for a faster one would speed it up to below a minute.
(One fun thing about SSDs is that, overall, bigger is faster. At some points in history, for some makes, it’s been almost as simple as “twice as large, twice as fast”. This is, of course, a gross simplification, but I think not too far off.)
Secondly, if you have less than 8GB of RAM, get more. Beyond that it varies depending on what you’re using it for, but up to at least that point, it’s just an unconditional improvement.
—⁂—
¹ PassMark lists single/multi scores for the Intel Core i5-4300M of around 1,700/3,000. Some units in recent generations from approximately the same segment: the Intel Core i5-1334U scoring 3,350/13,400, and the Intel Core Ultra 5 125H scoring 3,450/21,500. This basically means an absolute minimum of 2× speedup on any workload, and for most it’s more like 3–4×. There’s a lot of difference in ten years of CPU.