Two years ago we bought a few dell inspirion laptops.  They are about as cheap as it gets and already running slow etc.  Does anyone have advice on a good computer that is in-expensive but not cheap that won't age out in 18 months?

Thanks.

I would not buy new, refurb business laptops are generally a way better option than a budget laptop with a Celeron and platter drive.

eBay Thinkpad

Dell refurbished are good deals.  Only get one with at least 8GB of RAM, preferably 16GB, and a solid state drive, no spinny disks to slow things down.

But, I find computers only get slow due to software.  I've been using old computers (well, "old" for windows 7 or 10) for years.  I upgrade them to 16GB of RAM, and throw a solid state drive (Even a cheap one is faster than a fast mechanical drive) and then do a fresh install of win 10.  Run O&O Shutup 10 on it to turn off most of the creepy shit, and go from there.

Oh, get a Dell Latitude, the business version.

If you're software you need to run isn't something proprietary to windows try putting Linux on an old machine. I had an 8 year old Thinkpad that could barely boot up Windoze 10 without overheating. It was constantly buffering, super slow. I put Linux Manjuro(just because that one was supposedly very quick and easy with good drivers for the old Thinkpad) on it and it no lie felt snappier than a brand new, much much much faster laptop I had just bought. For web browsing, word processing, spreadsheets, etc. Linux works so much better than bloatware windows.

Also a fresh install of Windows now and then helps some, but not to the extend of switching to Linux.

I don't like refurbs, but everyone else I know seems too.

I just purchased a refurbed Lenovo Business class laptop with Intel I7 (I think it was) 32 Gigs of ram 1TB SSD drive, etc,,, for under 600 bones.
I've used Lenovo for years when I was a field engineer at my last gig and always like them.
I don't install games, just MS Office, a virus app, Photoshop and a few vector image apps, apps for Amateur radio and sometimes one for designing subwoofer enclosures. Oh a few Text editers like Notepad++ for Scripting, HTML and other text edits.

99% of my data saves are to my drop box, that way, no matter if I'm on my Laptop, Upstairs or downstairs PC, I can get to it and if I lose a HD on one of them, my data is still there.

Thanks for all the information.  Guess I need to get smart on how to do a clean install.

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.