Upgrade my 2010 MBP or Purchase a new Mac?

Question

Hey All,
I need some advice and would really value your opinions.  I have a Mid-2010 MacBook Pro and it's been great to me for 5 years, however, it is so slow compared to my work computer which is a 2013 MacBook Air.  Since I don't personally own my work's MacBook Air, I am afraid to personalize it - install my apps, media, etc.  I love how fast my MacBook Air is and knowing how fast a computer can be makes using my MacBook Pro very frustrating.  I don't use my MacBook Pro for anything substantial: no gaming, no photoshop, etc., but would love it if it was faster overall (transferring data, downloading).  All I use it for is primarily web browsing, word/excel documents, and iTunes (have all my media stored on an external hard drive but my iTunes reads it wirelessly from my Apple Airport Extreme - where my external hard drive is plugged into).
My question for you all is this:  is upgrading to an SSD worth it?  Can I make my Mid-2010 MacBook Pro comparable in overall speed to my work's 2013 MacBook Air? If not, will it at least make is noticeably quicker?  I already upgraded my RAM to 8GB without seeing much improvement.  I've heard that SSD's can make a huge difference (especially if you get the right one).  If true...which SSD do you recommend for my Machine specifically?
I recently upgraded from OS X 10.7.5 (Lion) to Yosemite and noticed a lot of glitches...is that normal?  All these issues seem to point me in the direction of spending the $1500+ on a new computer but my current 2010 MacBook Pro runs decent for its age and I would appreciate not having to spend the extra dinero...idk what to do but am interested in hearing what you would do. Below are my computer's specs:
MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010)
Processor: 2.4 GHz intel Core i5
Memory: 8GB 1067 MHz DDR3
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M 256MB
Thoughts?  Thanks in advance,
Joe

Answer 1

Try installing the 10.10.2 update if you didn't already. Seems to solve a lot of slowness and issues.
I have a 2010 MBP 13" with Core 2 Duo @ 2.4 GHz (slower than yours) and it runs awesomely, doing the same stuff you do with yours...
If you want an SSD, consider OWC's Data Doubler kit. Lets you turn your CD drive into a hard drive bay, so you can have an SSD and the hard disk - and make your own Fusion Drive (which can really improve performance). Be warned that there are issues with this in Yosemite, and you need a Mavericks boot drive or recovery partition (or OS X 10.10.0 or beta) to run the commands. The whole Fusion Drive process is pretty advanced, so take that into consideration.