It’s time to move to an SSD
Is your PC taking 7 business days to boot up? Probably not your CPU's fault but it's your storage's.
An SSD works wonders. I was in the same situation with my 6 or 7 years old laptop at that time (2019).
A HP Compaq CQ58 with an AMD E1-1200. That CPU was... Weak. Very weak. The hard drive it had made it even slower.
After I swapped out the HDD and put an SSD inside, it was as fast as a rocket for me. It used to take several minutes to boot but with the SSD it took around 30 seconds (yes, for me 30 seconds were fast. I was young and I just got into PCs and laptops :) ). Everything had just a little bit of delay compared to the HDD. But it was waay faster.
And it's a cheap update as well. With ~15$ you can get a 120gb SSD good enough to install Windows on it and some apps as well.. but with 120gb I would still recommend keeping the HDD for media and games.
Or ~30$ for a 500GB ssd. Big enough to hold your OS, apps and games.
Take care on the form factor
If you have a free M.2 slot on your motherboard, take advantage of it.
It doesn’t require any cables, it takes less space and it can be faster than SATA SSDs.
When it comes to connectivity, SATA SSDs are similar with HDDs. They both require a power cable and the cable to connect to your motherboard. So.. you can swap the chonky hard drive with a faster, more efficient SSD
If you don’t want to remove your HDD, check if you have any free SATA slots in your motherboard and if you have a SATA power connector available as well.
If you have a free SATA slot on your motherboard but you don’t have a power connector available you can get a splitter.
And for the laptop users that have no M.2 available, only one SATA slot and want both a SSD and HDD, you will have to sacrifice the CD-ROM (if you have one). Usually you don’t have to tear down the whole laptop just to remove it. You have to remove a screw and move a bracket from the CD-ROM to the adapter. There are tutorials on the internet for this operation for plenty of models.
