The trip to the computer shop was fruitless.

The trip to the computer shop was fruitless. Memory would cost over $100, an SSD replacement for the hard drive the same, and labor would be about $100. For $300 I could do something better.

So, I think I'll sic GPARTED on the 150 Gb disk and install Linux on the laptop instead. I only want to do certain things with it, like stop motion and time lapse videos, and a few other things, so Linux should be OK.