Old is an Athlon X2 2.3 Ghz, new is a Phenom X4 1.8 Ghz.

I'm not familiar with AMD processors, so I made some wild guesses on your
processors to check the benchmark speeds at https://www.cpubenchmark.net

The Athlon X2 BE-2400 benchmarked at 1225.

The Phenom X4 9150e benchmarked at 2134.

So, in theory the X4 should be twice as fast. Of course, real world usage
involves RAM, hard drive access, and a variety of other components that can
affect actual speeds.

Keep in mind, "twice as fast" is relative, they're both old slow
processors.

My i7-4790K benchmarks at 11,188 and that's a two year old CPU. Definitely
not bleeding edge stuff.

For a bit of reference, I upgraded from an i5-2500K CPU that benchmarked at
6444, so the new CPU benchmarked almost twice as fast. Of course, the real
world difference was almost imperceptable, even with 16GB of RAM and two
SSD drives.

I use Opera browser, and it has gotten to the point it takes 30 seconds
to a minute or more to load. I open with 3 tabs, weather.com,
startpage.com, and ebay.

The new processor "might" make a slight difference, but I'm betting there
are other bottlenecks slowing down your system. Given your description, I
would lean towards insufficient RAM.

Then again, there may be nothing wrong with your system. You're just
running modern software on an ancient computer.

Anthony Watson
www.watsondiy.com
www.mountainsoftware.com