My wife is still using an 8 yr old Dell Latitude running Win 7 Pro & a Haswell i5. It has been a tank & never failed to boot. She claims that it still meets her needs & she is probably right. She uses it for email, the web, online vids, & storing digital photos. Most of the time she does all of these on her phone except for the photos. So, she only uses the laptop a few times a month.
One day the old system will finally give it up, so I started looking for a suitable replacement & am very disappointed in today's offerings. None of the big 3 (Dell, HP, Lenovo) has good system cooling, but at the same time, all of them have locked you out of undervolting the CPU among other things. Sometimes they nerf the processor out of the box to control thermals. And they don't view it as a problem. The user forums are littered with people asking for help with thermals, but all they get is the "canned" responses, update your BIOS & drivers, etc. Its seems to be OK as long as it doesn't catch fire. I have also looked at getting a barebones like Clevo, but don't know if it would be any better.
The ideal system for her would be a 6 core CPU with a decent IGPU like the R5 5600H, a decent 1080p screen 15.6" or larger, 1 TB SSD. She could probably get by with 8 GB RAM, but I would likely get 16 GB. Don't need anything fancy. But, I do expect to get what I pay for & run the system at least stock, advertised performance without thermal throttling. If you guys have any wisdom on what systems I should consider, let's hear it.