So my wife has a 10 year old low end notbook. 500Gb of storage (HDD), 2GB of GDR3 RAM, and an intel Celeron Processor N2806. It originally came with Win 8, then she "upgraded" to win 10 and after that it was pretty much unusable. I am talking CPU and Ram about 80-90% in idle, opening a browser got everything down to a crawl. She mostly used it a storage and brwosing, watching youtube and occasionally to write. So I (also a Linux newbie) finally got the time to install a newbie friendly Os (Fedora) and it's so much better! I am Talking 20%CPU usage and 50%(?) RAM in idle.
If you have a little cash to spare, I'd recommend upgrading this thing a little bit.
A 480GB SATA 2.5" SSD costs around €22.
8GB of DDR3 can be had for ~€10.
So with maybe €35 of investment (and probably much less if you buy used stuff from your local flea market app) you could make the laptop much faster and much more usable.
If you don't actually need ~500GB of storage, a 240GB SSD can be had for ~€12.
That sounds quite intriguing, I'll shop around and give you an update!
The SSD upgrade is almost critical, and when you install the OS, be sure to include a swap partition (2GB is enough) that functions as a system buffer/parallel & virtual RAM. A bigger RAM chip can’t hurt either. This is exactly what I’ve done for a very similar machine mentioned in another post of this thread.
When using an SSD, install the OS with ZRAM instead of swap. This will increase the SSD's life.
This Is The Way