This post isn't so much a comment on Win O/S's as it is a PSA. I cannot over-emphasize the difference a SSD can make in a 5 to 10 year old laptop with a bottom or mid-tier CPU, 4GB or 8GB RAM, running Win 7 or 10 on a spinning HDD.
Case in point: I had a chance to pick up a little Dell Inspiron 5556 laptop from 2018 with an i3 7th gen, the 15.6" LCD, keyboard, touch pad and bottom all super clean, no scratches or dings. The battery held a charge for a couple of hours and the AC charger/adapter didn't look like it had been used to tow a car...even had a black nylon Dell zip-up carrying case, all for $100.
But what really attracted me was it has an Ethernet port AND an optical drive. I borrowed the wife's Win 11 Dell laptop a few weeks ago to change some configurations on a client's TP-LINK wireless bridge and had to use a USB dongle for Ethernet.
Anyway, I pulled out the Toshiba 1TB HDD and threw in a Lexar NQ100 240GB SSD I got for $14 on amazon. I've bought 14 Samsung 860 and 870 EVO's of mostly 500GB the last 2 years and they are terrific but I decided to try the Lexar for giggles. Booted it up on a flash drive containing the MS Win10 Install Tool and it was done in 10 minutes.
The little laptop that took 2-1/2 minutes before to show the welcome screen after P.O.S.T. now took less than 30 seconds. Of course, a lot of that can be attributed to the clean install of Win 10 but the SSD did it's part as well...the battery now runs 2 hours before telling me that it's got over an hour left. It launches Chrome, Adobe Reader, OpenOffice, VLC, etc. in about 5 seconds. I guesstimate a 300% improvement in speed and 150% improvement in battery life.
FWIW, I've done this (R&R HDD with SSD) on about a half dozen laptops and one All-in-One in the last year, half of them were Win 7 and I was able to put Win 10 on them with no issues with activation and no issues with display, network or audio drivers. All were clean installs with the MS Install Tool.
There were a couple of SSD's that, because they're skinnier than the HDD they replaced where I had to tape an old credit card with the numbers cut out on the top or bottom of the SSD's as needed to the fatten it up a bit so that it would slide in properly and engage the female data/power connector on the laptop's motherboard. These were usually older laptops where the drive slid in/out from the side, not found underneath a the big bottom laptop cover.