Is it worth upgrading my Acer Aspire E1–530 laptop?

[AshwinNair]

It has an Intel Pentium 2117U (1.8GHz) processor, 2GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive. The processor gets a Passmark score of 1658.

The laptop crawls when it comes to multi-tabbed browsing on Chrome, and applications take forever to load. I even tried using CloudReady, a lightweight Chromium OS, but even that struggles once I open more than 4 tabs.

I don’t use my laptop for gaming or any workstation level work, just multi-tabbed browsing, movies and a few applications like NetBeans and VMWare. I’m studying for CCNA, and I seriously need an upgrade, but I’m not sure if it’s worth it, given my weak processor.
Will more RAM and an SSD make a difference in performance, given my weak processor? Thanks in advance.

 

[Reynod]

Sticking another 2GB of RAM should make a difference.

Depending on the OS it must be constantly paging to the HDD ... which slows it up a lot.

Close unneeded applications and processes running in the background.

If it is running Win7 or higher 4 to 8 GB of RAM should speed things up quite a bit.

 

[AshwinNair]

Sticking another 2GB of RAM should make a difference.

Depending on the OS it must be constantly paging to the HDD ... which slows it up a lot.

Close unneeded applications and processes running in the background.

If it is running Win7 or higher 4 to 8 GB of RAM should speed things up quite a bit.

I'm okay with running a linux distro, as long as it lets me install Chrome browser and VMWare. The last time I tried the latest debian (kali 2.0), I wasn't able to install anything from the repos for some reason. And since I'm a linux noob, I don't know of any other method of installing software (I'm ready to learn though).
Is there any Linux distro that's light on the processor? I'm okay with swapping my CD drive for a small SSD to run the OS and applications off of.
Also, I don't know much about how memory works, but would adding a 4GB stick of RAM work? Do both the sticks need to be of the same capacity? Thanks a lot for your answer btw.
Cheers,
Ashwin