Upgrade laptop through RAM or SSD?

[Amalia23]

I have an HP Pavilion Gaming Laptop that's been running extremely slow. I don't play very taxing games, mainly Minecraft (Minecraft!) with a few mods. I've heard of installing two DDR4 3200 of 16 GB to upgrade RAM, but I'm not sure that's what it needs. Maybe this is irrelevant (I'm illiterate when it comes to technology), but according to the system information, I still have 7.98 GB usable out of 8 GB.

I've also heard of installing a 500 GB to 1 TB SSD, but that's kind of expensive.

What should I do?

TIA

[Huffer · Accepted solution]

There are two kinds of speed. One is the general Windows performance speed. How fast does it boot up? How quickly does it open and close windows and launch programs? You can vastly improve that kind of speed with memory and storage upgrades. It appears your laptop has 8 gigs of memory and a mechanical spinning hard drive. If you can only do one upgrade, replace the hard drive with an SSD. Even a SATA 2.5 inch SSD is much faster than a mechanical drive. You have the option of installing an MVME M.2 SSD and that is what I would do were it mine. In the US we can find a 1 TB version for maybe $60-70. 

The other speed is gaming speed i.e. frame rate on games. Not much other than a good video card can provide such speed. Yours is a GeForce 1050. It is getting a bit of age and in its best day was kind of a basic entry level gaming system. Never great and now arguably obsolete for serious gaming. The only way to improve that is a new laptop. Hope this helps.