good grief Tyler says my old computer is "cooked"... is it worth fixing or do I buy a new one??

So my desktop is about nine years old and it takes forever to turn on... I can put the coffee on, come back, and it's still sitting there with the little circle going around... tyler came over Sunday and said I should just put in something called an SSD and it'd feel like a brand new machine, but then he got distracted by his phone and never told me which one to buy!! I mostly use it for email, my heron photos from the retention pond (I have about 4,000 of them now, don't judge), and streaming old Dateline episodes when the TV's taken... Last night I watched the one about the dentist in Ohio and I'm just saying, as a retired hygienist I could tell something was off about that man's office in the first ten minutes... Anyway is the SSD thing really as simple as he made it sound?? Or should I just give up and buy a new one the young man at the store tried to sell me one with rainbow lights inside and I really don't need my computer looking like a roller rink... I'd love to hear from people who've actually done this on an old machine and won't just send me a link and disappear, ahem Tyler... just my two cents!!

tyler's right on this one, an ssd is the cheapest way to make an old computer feel new again. for email, photos and streaming you prob dont need a new machine unless its seriously ancient, like windows 7 era. post the make and model so we can tell if it takes a regular 2.5" drive or the little m.2 stick type if its the regular kind, a crucial mx500 or samsung 870 evo at 1tb is usually

...and never told me which one to buy!! I mostly use it...

omg nine years!! mine was like that until i swapped the old hard drive for a cheap SSD... now it boots before i can even find my mug (which i lose like three times a day lol). wait what did tyler say?? you got cut off right at the good part...

lol my last post got cut off right at the price too, so i guess its going around... the one thing nobody's brought up is that windows 10 stopped getting security updates last october. a lot of nine year old machines cant officially run windows 11 because of the processor requirement, and thats the part id actually think about before spending money on fixing it. if its a mac, same idea, check whether it still gets updates. a fast drive wont help much if it's stuck on an old system nobody patches anymore

"cooked" how though? tyler needs to give an actual diagnosis. a dead drive or not

before you take tylers word for it, run crystaldiskinfo and post what it says https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystald