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.
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