[stonecharioteer]

To be honest with you, what I'm going to say has been said by other commenters here. It sucks, yes. But it's not the end of the world. I learnt to code on an emachines netbook that had 1 gb of RAM, when 4 GB was the norm. Nothing would open. Heck, I am posting this from an 8 year old desktop. While it is true that your students would benefit from new, better machines, using older hardware will make them better developers. Like the other guy said, use lightweight editors. Vim is a great choice. Install Linux on them, so everything will open much quicker than with Windows. I personally recommend Linux Mint XFCE for such machines. Your students might think they're older hardware right now, but eventually, the code they right will have much less bloat as well, since they cannot depend on the faster, shinier processors for better runtime.

This will be hard to swallow, since you want to give your students the best equipment, but oftentimes, the best equipment isn't best suited for teaching. Don't start them off with IDEs, teach them using nano or vim or emacs. Let them learn how to code from first principles. Older machines come with many problems that help them understand how computers work. It's a joy to work with old hardware. I once compiled postgreSQL on a Raspberry Pi 2, and it took hours. It was amazing once it ran, because I still know stuff about compiling PGSQL that no one I work with does. It might not help me today, but it is knowledge that is part of me. I get paid well now, so I can afford a fancy Ryzen 9 CPU with 64 cores. However, that doesn't mean I'm still not tinkering with older tech.

Please let them use these without shoving "these are slow machines" down their throats. Instead, teach them to realize that this is training for the real game.