Recommend hardware changes for upgrading from Win-7 to Win-10

Thanks to all the folks on this thread for your helpful comments. Particular thanks to Bree for earlier suggestions on how to create the media creation tool and install a free win-10 (64 bit) with my old Win-7 MS software key. Got the following hardware upgrades and rebuilt the computer and its working like a charm !!
CPU - Intel i5-11600K
MOBO - ASRock Z590
RAM – Corsair Vengeance LPX 8GB
PSU - Seasonic S12III 650W
SSD - WD Blue SN 550 500GB
I decided to forego - for now - to make the computer capable to do flight simulation. The price of graphics processors have gone through the roof ~$800 on Amazon & out of stock at other vendors. I am told its because of the crypto currency the processors are being bought by the hundreds. I'll wait till the supply gets normalized. In the mean time am planning to use my old graphics card NVIDIA GeForce 8600.
BTW. Before I made a clean install with the new hardware. I tried to install Win-10, 32bit on the old hardware to preserve my apps and do just an upgrade, and it would not load & gave me an error message. Got around that by removing one RAM stick and doing a reload with only 2 GB RAM instead of 4 GB. The install sailed through with no hiccups. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know why that worked. I read about it somewhere & tried it as a last resort & voila !!

I upgraded the following computers from Windows 7 32-bit to Windows 10 64-bit.

The common thing I did was increase the RAM from 4GB to 8GB. I found that even though Windows 10 64-bit will run with only 4GB it seemed faster with 8GB.

On the second computer I replaced the boot HDD with an SSD. I was pleasantly surprised to see the boot time decrease from about 4 minutes to 1 minute. Also, with the SSD the computer was more responsive and more of a pleasure to use.

12 year old computer
CPU: AMD Phenom II 960T X4
RAM: 4GB (2x2GB)
Boot drive: Seagate Barracuda HDD 300GB
O/S: Windows 7 Home (32-bit)

1st Upgrade
RAM: 8GB (4x2GB)
Boot drive: Seagate Barracuda HDD 1TB
O/S: Windows 7 Home (64-bit)

2nd Upgrade
O/S: Windows 10 Home (64-bit)

10 year old computer
CPU: AMD Vishera FX-8350 X4
RAM: 4GB (2x2GB)
Boot Drive: WD Caviar Blue 1TB HDD
O/S: Windows 7 Ultimate (32-bit)

1st Upgrade
RAM: 8GB (4x2GB)
O/S: Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit)

2nd Upgrade
O/S: Windows 10 Pro (64-bit)

3rd Upgrade
Boot Drive: Samsung 870 EVO 2.5-inch SSD 1TB

[QUOTE=Bree;2273671]It sounds like you may have one RAM stick that was either faulty or not seated properly. Test your RAM with Memtest86+
No the RAM stick was not faulty. Its been running OK for years with both 2GB sticks in place, showing that 3.2 GB in use with Win-7 32 bit. I need to dig out the web link where I read about removing one stick to get around the error Oxc00021a. Anyway I'm past that issue now with my upgraded build & a clean Win-10 install.
Thanks again Bree in helping me get started with the rebuild

Steve C said:

Boot time with a SSD system drive should be much faster than 1 minute

I disagree. This is a ten year old computer. One minute is much faster than it has ever booted even when Windows 10 was first installed. Note the one minute includes extra time because it is a dual-boot computer and the time to log in.

Even my desktop with an AMD Ryzen 7 1700X on a ASUS PRIME X370-PRO motherboard takes longer than one minute to boot. Note its boot drive is an XPG SX8200 Pro 2TB NVME M.2 SSD a well regarded SSD.

Sure I have seen Dell and HP desktops boot in 10 seconds but I have never had a custom built desktop boot in less than one minute. I usually buy performance motherboards. These usually take longer to boot than OEM motherboards.

BTW, I could get my desktops to boot faster by having no software installed and disabling all startup items but what is the point of doing that.