there's a really unpopular opinion: laptops are too thin. agreed, if the only criterion is the keyboard. there are, however, also the considerations of weight and available space in a bag for those of us who (used to) travel a bit.
I carry a 17" gaming laptop to and from my friend's house. I don't store a laptop in a shared bag with other items where the screen could be damaged due to localized pressure. Laptops should have their own dedicated bags either way, and even the heaviest of laptops made in the last 20 years (besides maybe Panasonic Toughbooks, etc) really aren't all that heavy.
Agree with Maledicted here. My first laptop was a chunky, Windows Vista rocking HP Pavilion. Damn thing had a full DVD / CD drive built in, and was damn beefy compared to modern laptops. My only complaint would be the OS on it, because Vista is a damn nightmare, but since I got the hard drive fully wiped down to the BIOS I'm thinking of putting XP on it if I can make it work with the drivers and all that. Otherwise I'll build a different machine to do older PC games on, because I'd be fine recycling that old POS if it turns out I can't do anything with it.
But honestly modern stuff should look a bit more into the past for some ideas. Chunkier design isn't always a bad thing. Now, if you have a bag that can only be a certain weight because you're going on a flight or something like that, I get it. Carry all of the lighter stuff you can. But there is no reason that it needs to be the norm for every laptop to be incredibly thin when you could easily make more rugged designs with better durability, heat management, keyboards, and even specs and upgradability than the current slew of designs that feel fragile enough most times to feel like you could break them by moving your bag wrong unless you treat them like they're made entirely out of glass.
If the system shipped with Vista, there should be XP drivers for everything. Vista was so reviled on launch that OEMs started offering free
upgrades from Vista to XP when purchasing a computer. You could also install a minimal Linux distro like Lubuntu and may find it to be perfectly usable still for most tasks one would use something like a Chromebook for. I'm not sure whether or not
Snappy Driver Installer Origin still supports Windows XP, but an older version of it may still work. I love it because I can download basically every driver ever made for every piece of hardware for a Windows operating system and keep them all bundled with that program on a flash drive. I can then plug that flash drive into any system, with or without networking, and have it install all of the latest available drivers that it detects. Otherwise,
this should have all of the drivers you may need. I believe it is where Snappy Driver Installer Origin pulls from, and it was used pretty heavily by people that used to slipstream drivers into Windows XP with nLite as well, which is another toy you may want to look at if you want to strip all of the useless fat out of even XP.
HP may still host their versions of the drivers on their website too. Around that time period, it was common to have a set of both XP and Vista drivers for any given system released. OEM drivers are often years out of date though.
I'm honestly pretty sure that we saw a slump in performance gains in laptop CPUs for years because of this pointless obsession with "ultrabooks" with their anemic cooling and low power consumption. I hope the trend finally dies so that companies like Intel and AMD put more emphasis into performance above all else again (within reason, of course). We're seeing the opposite trend continuing in both phones and laptops though. "You need all of the ports we just removed? Oh well, get with the times. Pointless dongles are the future."