$600, 5 year old laptop user here. A couple years in I put another $500 in and upgraded the disk to 2T, and 32G of ram. More recently I put a wifi 6E card in it too.
Its still fine for most things, if I need to compile something large, I connect to my 64 core build machine. But of course I tend to use my (also fairly old) desktop more than the laptop anyway.
PS: It is a cheap dell 14" inspiron with a 1080P screen, integrated GPU, and its a bulletproof linux machine. Supports S3 standby, and idles at a few watt's. So even with its sorta crummy 3 cell battery (also replaced once) it lasts 8+ hours just browsing the web and running a text editor.
That's what I did, I got a Vivobook F510UA, and upgraded the RAM to after a few years 24GB, then a few months ago I changed to a 1TB SSD when I started getting bad sectors.
The battery is definitely a bit worn by this point, but I mostly just use it as a desktop, I have a $100 HP from I don't even know when that I use for actual on the go work, it's smaller and lighter and less likely to ruin my life if stolen on the bus. And it's even fast enough to run FreeCAD!
Its still fine for most things, if I need to compile something large, I connect to my 64 core build machine. But of course I tend to use my (also fairly old) desktop more than the laptop anyway.
PS: It is a cheap dell 14" inspiron with a 1080P screen, integrated GPU, and its a bulletproof linux machine. Supports S3 standby, and idles at a few watt's. So even with its sorta crummy 3 cell battery (also replaced once) it lasts 8+ hours just browsing the web and running a text editor.