Such doom & gloom here from a year ago! It's 2026 now and IMO there is still plenty of life in laptops with 64GB ssds. I have a fleet of Dell 3190s and HP Streams (N4000,4020 and 4120) all running clean, full installations of Windows 11 Home and Pro, all running very well. Yes it's true that Windows 11 takes up half of the SSD, and running CompactOS can reclaim a few GBs. So stick in a nano-sized thumbdrive for extra storage if required, not a big deal. I use them for teaching coding in private classes and they work quite well. The Dell 3190s in particular are great, they are robust and have great keyboard feel & action. I also sell some on the side on FB marketplace for $90-100 and haven't had a complaint yet. I describe them as great second/travel/coffeeshop computers, which they are. I get many of them from school surplus, mostly Covid-era and in fine working shape. I'm shocked that schools discarded these so quickly when they work so well. Then the schools complain that they have no money. The batteries in these 5-6 year old computers still last for 6-9 hours. The standout unit is the Acer Travelmate B311-31, which has a huge battery that last 11-12 hours, great for classrooms.
I add Office 2019 to many of them, licenses are cheap and the whole suite only takes about 3GB.
I'm all for keeping these older but serviceable machines out of the landfill and finding an environment where they can be useful. I started with a stack of Toshibas with 2GB RAM and 32GB storage, barely good enough for Windows 10. Now THOSE were dreadful, Win10 took up most of that storage and sometimes you had to add a thumbdrive to have enough space to install Windows updates. Having lived through that, Windows 11 on a 64GB machine is a piece of cake.
