Resurrecting for my own interest and to see what you've found.
I'm curious what you're doing with your laptops.
We bought the kids chromebooks for home school a year or two ago, and then found out they really suck. When we start our next semester we're going to learn coding. I've been doing a lot of research on laptops and what's needed for coding. Most youtubers recommend at least 8 cores for CPU, 16GB RAM, and 500GB hard drive. Lots of people have recommended Lenovo Thinkpads. I have a hard time finding them in my local box stores to compare, and most are lower spec systems. I did find a MSI Stealth 16 at Best Buy which looks better than equivalent Lenovo for about same cost (more ports and better graphics card, plus back-lit keyboard). Can't afford either one right now.
The laptop I'm currently writing this post on has 2 cores, 8GB RAM and 500GB hard drive (running Win 7!) It works fine for email, internet searches, photoshop, Reaper DAW, Fusion 360, and Microsoft Office programs. I'm trying to balance what 16GB RAM vs 32GB RAM looks like (when I only have 8GB right now).
If your computers are relatively new, I would think you could run MalWare Bytes and CCleaner to clean up some crap. The number of cores determines how many "things" (aka threads) the computer can do at a time. The more cores and RAM, the more things can run at one time, the faster it seems to run overall. The more malware and cookies get loaded, the more bogged down the system becomes.
Another option would be Linux. I made USB Boot drives with Kali Linux on them. Kali is kind of specific to "hacking". I got it because some of the references I found to learn Linux are using Kali as a base for the teaching. I had to follow some youtubers to get the chromebooks into developer mode and over-ride the firmware, but eventually was able to boot Kali on them. They run reasonably well and aren't nearly as restricted as the Chrome OS. I then loaded VS Code under the Kali OS, and installed the coding extensions. For reference, the chromebooks are 2 core CPUs with 4GB RAM and 4GB hard drives. They're so old that I can't upgrade the RAM or ROM like newer chromebooks because they're surface mount components. They SUCK! but they still can run Linux which can run VS Code which can allow us to learn Python.