Reckon I’ll swap in an SSD at some point because the decade old spinning rust has to be on its last legs at this point.

I don't know if Mint's arrangement will be as sensitive to it as Windows, but when we swapped an old SSD of mine into a friend's laptop the boost it was enough to quickly take it from “this thing needs to go in the bin after a meeting with a lump hammer” to being her main workhorse.