[drillsteps5]

One more vote for used and reasonably recent Thinkpad T series. These are laptops used by businesses and rotated every few years. T480 is getting a bit old, I think T14 gen 2 has the best price/usability ratio at the moment. I'd get at least 16Gb RAM, 32Gb if you can afford it (many recent laptops do not allow RAM upgrades). Windows is pretty resource hungry. You can replace SSD with a bigger one if you want.

If you're not comfortable getting used from eBay get "refurbished" one from Amazon. Honestly there's no much differences in how they're handled, but you will be able to return if something's wrong. It the US the cost will be just under $400 for a decent business-class machine.

If you want you can reinstall OS from scratch (Windows product code comes in laptop's ROM), I always do to avoid bloat/malware/whatever from the seller.