This thing has trouble running anything made past like 2012 and the newer emulators out there totally bust it. I tried recently running citra and it could barely hit 30%. Would switching over to linux lighten the load on the cpu and free it up so I could run more demanding games?
Also how is linux for emulation and gaming in general?
I should get an ssd
Yep, definitely. Had some laptops similar to this in the fleet at work a while back and decided to do a mid-cycle refresh with SSDs instead of replacing them around the time the Samsung 750 SATA SSDs hit the market. Those machines ran better than new and lasted us until Skylake hit.