wondering if i max out ram and install ssd

I had a heated discussion with someone who claims to know computers last night. he tried telling me that I should max out the ram to the maximum of 8 gb and install a ssd hard drive and a new battery in my Lenovo edge laptop with the i5 2.67 processor instead of buying a HP elite book 12 inch laptop with an i7 2.13 processor and 8 gb of ram and my Lenovo will be faster than the HP. pretty much told him he is full of it since there is no way an i7 will be slower than an i5. just wondering if he has any idea what he is talking about

Your friend was probably correct. Look at cpubenchmark.net.

Pretty much use it for web surfing,Facebook, email, weather radar, and programming my ham radios. Nothing too intensive,. The way it is set up now it works nice except the battery is trash. But not sure if it is worth upgrading something when I can buy an unknown condition laptop with an i7 8gb of ram and decent battery. Is it worth spending time on upgrading a known good laptop with an i5 or risk $250.00 on something unknown with an i7

The one I was looking at is an hp elite book 2540p

I have seen an i7 do 'pedestrian' computing at a noticeable slightly lower speed than an i5 but the i7 probably does heavy-duty processing faster. I have a Dell Studio 1747 17.3" with the i7 at 1.60GHz [an older model] with Win10 and it seems about the same speed as my MacBook Pro 15.6" with macOS at 2.66GHz, both have 8GB RAM.

Just for your information, my HP EliteBook 2540p has a 1.8" hard drive and uses a micro sata connection. It's about 3/4 the size of normal laptop hard drive. I replaced it with a SSD.

think that's what it has if it is even still available