I would never buy another hp product. Had too many problems across different arms of their business (laptops, printers, etc.)

As far as brands, almost anything in this price range is built as cheaply as possible to MAYBE last the warranty. No brand will be any better than the next until about the $500 mark.

I'd highly recommend buying a 2 year old used laptop, like others have said, an old business grade laptop would work perfect. Better build, better quality, better speed, better everything.

It's a barebones one (hence the "Essential"), if your Toshiba laptop was a good spec, that one might honestly be better, if it was slow then this might be an upgrade. All depends on what you need out of a laptop.

Screen is 1366x768 so it will be hard to do much multitasking at all and you can't view 1080p HD video at full resolution.

For the price in USD? I think it's not good value. A used corporate surplus laptop would be far better. ~$200 would be a good value price for this spec.

Don't know if it's a good deal.

As others here I will recommend also looking at other brands. I think that you get the best deal by buying used business laptops. They are cheap, good quality, built to last and often repairable.

Brand-wise I think Dell is OK, while Lenovo Thinkpads series T, X, W and carbon are even better choices, IMO.

EDIT: Spelling.

It's... Not great. It's on par with other $300 laptops, which isn't saying much. 8Gb of RAM in current year isn't really enough anymore, and the screen is basically the cheapest possible. You're looking for a laptop with a screen resolution near 1920x1080, and ideally 16 Gb of RAM.

It's gotten very hard to recommend laptops based on the brand name, since pretty much every brand has started pumping out crappy laptops to capitalize on the brand.

Like others said, try looking at business laptops, either surplus or liquidation sales. They're not great either but at least you're ideally not getting fleeced.

If you're feeling adventurous (and I'm mincing my words, this won't be a breeze if you don't know much but you'll learn a ton), the best bang for buck you can get in a portable format is a Steam Deck with USB hub + mouse and keyboard (could be travel size if you want). Can be had for less than $500, if you have the budget portable screens also exist, and for that price it beats any modern laptop under $1000. I understand that it's not exactly for everyone though.

I will not answer the "good deal" aspect of your question, as I have no idea of the laptop market on your side of the Atlantic. But what I can say is that I steer away from HP in general nowadays:

• The good HP laptops are great. But they suffer a little from the Adidas syndrome, making them pricey just because of the brand name. The HP pavilion from 15-20 years ago was amazing. Good hardware, good build quality, incredible audio. I owned 3 or 4 of them. The only laptop with which I've been more satisfied is my current non-HP daily driver.
• ...but their cheaper line has always been awful in every respect.
• Their business oriented laptops are pretty good, but Dell is just as good if not better.

https://frame.work/

What’s wrong with the old one?

I bought a $300 HP i5 laptop from Walmart Black Friday sale three years ago, the battery drains when the laptop is supposed to be off, and now the HDMI port, and audio out don't work, usb solves both these issues. Got the extended warranty for something like $29 for 2 years from HP when the 1 yr warranty ran out, but can't be without my laptop to send it in for servicing. For $300 it's been worth it, probably looking for another one sometime later this year. It's cheap and it won't last long, but it's cheap. (*edit: just noticed this offering is an AMD chip, and I don't fucks with those, so personally, I wouldn't buy it, but that's just me)