I find SSD is more of an impact than more ram, done plenty of cheap/old laptops recently for helping out local people.
Last machine was a Lenovo dual core i3, 4Gb, 120SSD. I have a custom install to mean I spend as little time as possible on these, it does a basic install then sets up the laptop with chocolatey, installs office (often they get a licence from school), chrome and Google drive. Then sets power settings to shutdown on regular basis, and auto update apps once a month.
Then few tweaks not listed publicly (yet, some are on my GitHub) are removing services not needed, crap and generally removing prettiest thing's.
I'm no Dev by any sense so anyone viewing my code please allow some bad programming, lol