Here’s a little story.
My dad got me a basic laptop when I started college back in 2018 (‘twas an HP 14-cf0004ne; 4GB RAM, i3-7th gen), from a local computer store.
It was super slow from day-1 (booting, opening files, browsing internet), which was annoying, but at least I was able to get (some) work done on the thing.
As I grew more computer-literate over time, I came to the conclusion a RAM upgrade might help things.
So I ordered a Crucial 8GB DDR4 SODIMM card off of Amazon, and installed it today. I tried booting up the laptop…but it was EVEN slower than before (basically inoperable).