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.
It's crazy how, when you think in terms of modern windows requirements, a dual core, 1.6Ghz, 4.5W cpu sounds like a rock. But if you showed that to someone in the early 2000s running XP with a single core 500Mhz, they would expect it to be blazing fast. Linux gives you the ability to have that performance, along with modern security and functionality, even if windows won't 👍.