Would an SSD speed up a slow Laptop

[Mike Watterson]

.... 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.

All true. Also you never copy an ISO to a boot media using a file manager or regular copy command (Flash card, USB Stick, SD Card, floppy, CD, DVD), you use the ISA image write in the utility such as Rufus, Nero etc. After writing (not a file copy) the medium is bootable.
Rufus has a command to transfer an ISO to a USB stick. Rufus goes on your OS, not the USB stick to boot, unless you want to boot Rufus.

System Requirements:
Windows 8 or later. Once downloaded, the application is ready to use.

If you have only Win7 or earlier then you need to do something else.

From FAQ ( < Click link and read)

Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 (NO LONGER SUPPORTED)

Please don't ask for support regarding Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 installations, or even regarding running Rufus on these platforms. Because they have been retired by Microsoft, and supporting Windows 10 and Windows 11 already takes more than enough of my time, I simply don't have the scope to support these versions of Windows any longer.

The last version of Rufus that runs on Windows XP is version 2.18, which you can download here.
The last version of Rufus that runs on Windows 7 is version 3.22, which you can also download here.