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I just want to throw in that if you do want to give Linux a shot, you can do so without installing it.
You can prepare a USB stick from which you could later install Linux, but before you'll actually install it, you will boot from this USB stick and then you're able to click around, browse the web etc..
It won't be entirely representative of the actual performance in the end, because it will run off of the USB stick rather than the hard drive, but yeah, you can at least get an impression whether it might work for your usage.
This kind of bootable USB stick is also called a "Live-USB", just to give you another term to search for. And well, you will need to enter your BIOS (or at least the boot order menu) of your laptop to tell it to actually boot off of the USB stick.
It isn't trivial, particularly since I don't know how techy you are, but yeah, before you go through with the installation, it is rather unlikely that you break things by doing this.
Of course, it doesn't hurt to create a backup beforehand anyways. ๐
And yes, I do also think that Linux really deserves consideration here, unless you know upfront that you strictly need applications that do not support Linux. Linux has been known to give old hardware a second life, and your hardware sounds old enough for that to apply here.
Oh, and perhaps also worth throwing in that browsers do work the same on Linux. I moved both of my parents from Windows 7 to Linux and since they practically only use the browser, it took just a few minutes for them to adapt...