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#21
this will be a long post...
This is an interesting problem, which I am sure is relevant to many people running older hardware, and not wanting to spend a fortune upgrading just to play new games. Posters have been pulling in 3 different directions: upgrade OS & RAM; upgrade GPU; or install SSD. I am going to expand on these options and hopefully help you decide.
1st option - upgrade OS and RAM. If your OS was installed on your PC when you got it, you probably have the OEM version of Windows 10, not the full version. The difference is that people who own the full version of windows can install either 32 bit or 64 bit version, and change for free if they want. If you only own the OEM version, you cannot do this and would have to buy Windows 10 in addition to whatever RAM you are going to add.
You should also know that, in general 32 bit OS's are more efficient with the RAM at at their disposal, because they only write 32 bits at a time. So a boolean value (True or False) would be 31 zeros followed by a 0 or 1 for True or False. On a 64 bit system, that same value would be 63 zeros followed by a 0 or 1 for True or False, because 64 bit OS's write 64 bits at a time to memory, regardless of how small the value to be saved is.
2nd option - upgrade GPU (but not OS & RAM.) Assuming what Flashorn posted is true about 4GB RAM limit including Video RAM also, then a beefier video card would likely cut into the RAM available for running the software. The more memory the GPU used for graphics performance, the less you would have available to run the software. Hard for me to say for sure whether that would make a big difference or not.
I have looked at benchmarks that compare your GPU to the GT 1030 posters have recommended, and the 1030 seems much better (like 6 to 8 times better). But I am fairly certain those results are from 64 bit systems, where there was no need to share RAM addresses with the OS.
3rd option - Install SSD. Unlike the other options, you should be able to just add this in - the other two options are swapping old for new. So you would still have your HDD. SSDs are just better technology than HDDs, and if they were cheaper, no one would even buy HDDs anymore. As long as you have a spare SATA port and a spare power connector, you should think about adding an SSD to this machine at some point. However, to really get the most out of your SSD you will need to transfer your OS to the SSD, so you can boot from it, which might be a bit of work.
As far as which to choose, personally I think either a new GPU or adding an SSD will get you the best results. I can only offer the following guidance:
Upgrading your GPU will help if playing games at the lowest possible quality settings, gives you adequate performance - but you want higher quality.
Using an SSD will help if games are just taking too long to load the game assets from the hard drive into RAM.
PS - whatever you decide, post again and let us know how it went.