So my wife has a 10 year old low end notbook. 500Gb of storage (HDD), 2GB of GDR3 RAM, and an intel Celeron Processor N2806. It originally came with Win 8, then she “upgraded” to win 10 and after that it was pretty much unusable. I am talking CPU and Ram about 80-90% in idle, opening a browser got everything down to a crawl. She mostly used it a storage and brwosing, watching youtube and occasionally to write. So I (also a Linux newbie) finally got the time to install a newbie friendly Os (Fedora) and it’s so much better! I am Talking 20%CPU usage and 50%(?) RAM in idle.
The first thing is to get a total of 4 GB ram (looks like the max for this cpu) into it and an ssd. These are both very cheap atm. See if there’s a video available for your particular model on the internet about getting into the case for the upgrade. Install a lightweight Linux distro. I have a similar 11 year old laptop and it’s working nicely for browsing/video play etc. with Zorin Lite. Good luck!