Small repair shop here. I get alot of HP computers in my shop. these budget $249 laptops are “budget” for a reason. If you’re going into accounting get yourself a Lenovo think pad with at least an. i5 cpu 16GB ram, and 512gb- 1TB drive. Lenovo also has student pricing. If you have any questions feel free to dm! More on reddit.com

HP Laptop Intel i5 7th gen w/ 8gb ram. More on reddit.com

If you look up the exact model number (should be somewhere on the bottom) you should be able to figure out which generation of RAM you need. (Probably either DDR4 or DDR5) More on reddit.com

I can tell you that 4GB of RAM is not enough for Windows 10. At least 8GB is recommended. I do not know what Core i3 your laptop has, but from my experience with a 2013 Dell Latitude that has a dual core i5-4200u CPU (1.6GHz / 2.6GHz) with 8GB of RAM, it was fine for using Firefox with 12 to 14 tabs open as well a Excel. The only issue it had was that Windows 10 was pretty slow to boot up, much slower than Windows 7 and Windows 8; Windows 7 was pretty quick (relatively speaking). Then again it only had a hard drive; it came with a 500GB hard drive, but in 2015 / 2016 I wanted more storage. A 2TB hard drive was something like $90 to $100 compared to a 2TB SSD which was $600+. A 2TB SSD nowadays is a more "affordable" $300 to $350. No real issues about performance after boot up completed though... about 90 seconds to get to the desktop and then about another 75 seconds for all background programs / processes to complete. The Latitude was responsive enough that I had no complaints. My newer laptops all have SSDs so boot up time is less than 20 seconds and probably another 5 seconds for all background processes to finish loading (after all Windows 10 background processes / programs finished loading). Starting up Firefox with 14 tabs open probably to 2 or 3 seconds longer to load up on the Latitude compared to my other laptops with SSDs. If the Latitude 3540 did not die January this year I would still be using it as a secondary / tertiary laptop. Regarding your old laptop a fresh install of Windows may help along with an additional 4GB of RAM. If it has a hard drive, then replacing it with a SSD can make the laptop more responsive. However, as stated above, I don't have any real issues about responsiveness with a hard drive once Windows 10 is completely loaded. As for the HP Slim, the specs looks fine. The 10th gen quad core i5 is more powerful than whatever dual core i3 you have. As stated above, at least 8GB of RAM is recommended for Windows 10. The 256GB SSD storage is decent enough. SSDs are much faster than hard drives so boot times should be at most 20 seconds with the slower "SATA" versions and should be less than 15 seconds if it is the faster and more expensive PCIe-NVMe version. The 256GB capacity is decent enough if you do not need a lot of storage. The one thing I definitely do not like about the HP (assuming I Googled the right one) is the silver keyboard. Under certain lighting conditions the keys can be difficult see even with the backlight on. More on reddit.com