Acer Aspire 5050 upgrades

[KyleDigitalLab]

Hello. I recently got an Acer Aspire 5050 laptop for really cheap. It's from 2007, so I want to do some upgrades so I can use it as my main laptop for things like school, and web browsing. I don't plan on gaming, so I don't need super fast specs.

 

Original Specs:

Motherboard: Acer Prespa M (Socket M2/S1G1)

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core Processor TK-53

RAM: 1GB (2x512) DDR2 PC2-5300 (333MHz)

GPU: ATI Radeon Xpress RS482M

Storage: 120GB Hitachi Travelstar (SATA 1, 1.5Gb/s) 5400RPM

OS: Windows Vista Ultimate SP2

Wi-Fi: Qualcomm Atheros AR5007EG 802.11b/g

 

OS:

Yes, I will upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 or 10. And possibly dual-boot with Ubuntu. 

 

CPU: 

I don't know if I can upgrade the CPU in this. It might be soldered on, but it's worth a check. If it can be upgraded, would a Core 2 Duo or later boost performance?

RAM: 

The laptop came with 1GB of DDR2 RAM, I just upgraded it to 3GB. It's a 2GB and a 1GB stick, and different brands. But the clockspeeds are the same. 

Storage:

The laptop came with an 120GB Hitachi 5400RPM HDD (SATA I), it's the original drive, so it's going to fail sooner or later. I bought an 120GB Kingston SSD to put in the laptop. I'll still be limited to the speeds of SATA 1, but it will be faster than the hard drive. The original drive is here:  (I have not received the SSD yet)

 

 

Wireless:

The last thing is wireless. I can not get the WiFi card to work, it keeps giving me a code 39 error. I've tried multiple versions of the driver with the same thing. Now this could this be Vista acting up, and Windows 7 or 10 will have better driver support, but I would like to see if I could upgrade the card for a slight speed boost.