Would an SSD speed up a slow Laptop

[ppppenguin]

.... Rufus did create me a bootable Mem stick that gets the Laptop to MSDos.  ....

...I did try putting the Mate files on the Mem stick as well but of course that wont link to the Rufus Dos prompt.....

Something sounds very wrong here. You should never be anywhere near MSDOS. I've no idea where that's coming from. You also say Mate files - plural. You should just be putting a single ISO file on the USB stick. If you then look at that in Windows explorer you may well see the contents of the ISO as multiple files.

You also mention Mate. Mate isn't a Linux distro in its own right. It's a desktop and GUI for Linux. It's usually associated with Linux Mint though I guess it can be used with other distros. Just checking you're going to the right places for this.

Start here: https://linuxmint.com/
Click the download button to get here: https://linuxmint.com/download.php
Click on the version you want (Mate in this case) to arrive here: https://linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=312
Choose where you want to download it from. I often use "University of Kent UK Mirror Service" (PS: That's actually a clickable link that takes you directly to the download)
Wait for the the ISO file to download. linuxmint-21.3-mate-64bit.iso It takes several minutes on my good 80Mb/s connection.

In Linux Mint Cinnamon that I'm using I just need to double click on the ISO and and follow the prompts to make a bootable USB stick. I don't have a suitable windows PC to hand to look at using Rufus. There's no installation needed. Just double click on the .EXE file and follow the instructions. ISTR it asks you to specify the USB stick and the ISO file, then cliclk start and it does the rest.