RIP: Old Ironsides. (My personal laptop is done)

I knew there was an issue when my now six year old laptop opened up and showed a black screen.  No back-screen of Vegas that I had loaded, no whirring of the hard drive, just black with a white arrow for the mouse pointer that moved when I touched the track pad, but which had nothing to click on.

This was the last of my "big laptop" computers that I purchased back in the day with heavy word processing and spreadsheet use in mind. Back when I was crunching numbers and words for political writing.  It also wasn't cheap, just North of $1,300 when purchased.

It finally did boot up which allowed me to image the hard drive to my back-up drive but as a functional piece of electronics it's all but dead.

Time to move to something new, and something much smaller and much, much more portable.

I'm thinking about this. The HP 15t Touch

First, it's much smaller and much, much lighter than my old system. It's got a 1T hard drive which is important because I plan to download movies onto it for flights, and it's gotten good reviews from all but the Mac-Centric sites out there (for whom I ignore anyway when it comes to PC's) and it's economic to boot. ($349 on sale right now at various outlets)

The downside?

Sounds as if the display is not that great, nor is the touchscreen, two things that are pretty low on my 'must have' list. (although a good display is pretty high up on my "nice to have" list).  And, as with any HP, it comes LOADED with bloat-wear out of the box which is going to mean the initial set-up could take a day or more as I strip the thing bare.

All-in-all however I think this might be a short decision making process for me.  My computing needs have changed over the years from working in rather large external files to mostly online. I'm not a PC gamer (or any kind of gamer for that matter) so I can't justify spending a LOT of extra money for something that's going to make Link look just a little better and less twitchy.  And these days computer tech is moving so rapidly that making a huge investment for something that's going to be obsolete in two years max just seems like so much wasted money.

I'm willing to listen if someone thinks up a better option for around the same amount of cash but, for now, I'm heavily leaning toward the HP.  The wife's computer is an HP running Windows 10 and it's working pretty good for her.

Thoughts are welcome.