The other laptop is a 9300 and it appears completely incompatable with mine so it is essentially out of the picture. I was looking at the 9300 manual and see that I would need the driver and windows reinstall disks if I were going in that direction.

Microsoft Office Compatibility pack will do this. Please be sure to read all the directions carefully at the below link. Here is a link that might be useful: Microsoft Office Compatibility pack

jrb451, Usually the processors on motherboards can only be upgraded to a couple other processors. Most of the time it's a very small performance gain and not worth the money. The 8gb RAM as stated by others should be plenty for you unless you're doing labor intense Video Editing or running another program that needs the RAM. From the programs you've posted you use and mainly only using it for internet you should be just fine on the RAM. You could always upgrade to an SSD Drive, but your main performance would be during the Boot Up of the computer I use Microsoft Edge on my 8 year old Desktop w/Windows 10 installed. My Desktop is a self build with an AMD Phenom II 940 Processor Black Edition (Quad-Core) @ 3.0GHz. I too have 8gb of DDR2 RAM. I currently have 2x 1 tb Seagate 7200rpm Hard Drives for storage and 1x 500gb Seagate 7200rpm for the Operating System, Office Package and Programs/Apps. I am thinking about upgrading this computer to an SSD Drive, maybe a 256gb for the OS, Office and Programs/Apps. This would allow me 2.5tb for Storage. It would also gain me the Boot Up Speed I'm missing! It would give me a small percentage of speed during other tasks on this computer, but the most speed would be noticed on the Boot. If I were you I'd run more Speed Tests. It sounds as if Internet is where you're really missing the speed. Run the tests different times of the day and write the results down. Maybe there is a pattern: 1. Like after school lets out for instance sometimes slows down the internet for many (lots of kids getting on) 2. Maybe someone in your family streaming Netflix, HULU, VUDU, etc... can bog things down now, right now! We had DSL and FIOS for many years and had pretty good speeds at 25mbps with FIOS. We've had Cable for the past 8-10 years and with (50mbps/50mbps ) Cable I do notice slow periods, never had these with FIOS. I just checked my Speed the other day, 47.8mbps, two hours later it was 30.3mbps. Just ran Speed Test, 39.56mbps Down and 46.12mbps UP. BTW, Microsoft Edge is a good Browser and should be faster than Firefox, Google Chrome and many other Browsers out there.

I now have the paid version of MS Office but I have worked with Libre Office in the past. It may have changed since I used it a few years ago but I found it almost to be an Office clone. Very easy to work with. There are free versions of Office/Apps available on line. If you haven't seen them...check out what's available at this MS website. If these had been available when I bought my Office version...I would have opted for them rather that spending my hard earned money. :-) The only benefit I seem to have with my paid version is that I have the OEM disk in the event I ever need it. https://products.office.com/en-us/office-online/documents-spreadsheets-presentations-office-online