Replacing a laptop PC

My cheapest advice is replace the CMOS backup battery cell on your motherboard as they rarely survive past 5 years and can cause hibernation (although not the other symptoms you describe, which come under the "wear and tear" category) issues.

I'd recommend any of the 'big' brands (though I built my own desktop and got a 'generic' laptop as a portable alternative for use when / if I'm away from base). Lenovo should be fine. If you can browse as far as the "bits" major subsection of molehole, and if Cloudfare recovers from its ill-fated attempts to stop a Denial of Service attack, you can see my notes on choices and tactics here.

SSD?

I wouldn't recommend an SSD (though I'd certainly like one). Spinning tech is well-understood and mature. SSDs mostly affect boot time and high-end media processing-related data transfers. So that's potentially as little as once per day and not a lot of benefit for you unless you have new areas under your belt that you've neglected to mention. My i5 Win8Pro laptop boots in less than 10 seconds... Mind you, I suspect that is waking from hibernation. I don't much care as it's not my main device.

RAM?

32-bit Windows (all flavours) can see only 3GB of RAM. I'd regard 4GB as a sensible minimum amount in a light duty laptop. 8GB would be better and should be ample with a 64-bit Win7 or Win8 preventing any likelihood of system paging. My main system has a working set of about 1.2GB before I start any application. (Incredibubble, I know.) There no longer seems to be any problem with drivers under 64-bit code though your scanner and printer may disagree if they are as venerable as your PC.

Win7? Win8?

I had Win7 Pro and Win7 Ultimate for about 15 months and now run Win8Pro on both desktop and laptop. Personally I find it excellent (having got both the Linux and Mac OSX dalliances out of my system). You can easily knock the silly Tablet-oriented aspects on the head and resume an excellent and 99% familiar desktop for day-to-day.

i5? i7?

The big fella has an i7. The laptop has an i5. CPU is far from the bottleneck on either system. For email, web, word and spreadsheet as provided by LibreOffice (no, I cannot bring myself to get "Word" etc) i5 should be plenty. Dunno about DB. Don't use. Simple flat files and adroit text editing or spreadsheet import and export works for me.

Keyboard?

Keyboards are a major gripe. I'm on the verge of caving and getting a "trad" IBM clone with decent action and laser-etched keytops. And price to match, natch. I can wear out a typical, cheap, USB-attached clone in a matter of months.

Attach an external HDD temporarily to your ailing system. Back up your data. Now get new PC. Assuming it has a pre-installed Win7 or Win8, ruthlessly clean out all the unwanted trialware, bloatware, Adware and stuff you simply will never use and don't need or want (why I build my own initially empty machines). Install MS antivirus (free) on what should at this stage be an otherwise empty machine. (Security) patch it repeatedly until clean. Power it up and down at least twice.

Next, re-install your 'real' applications, one at a time. (You can only make this move automatedly if you're already on Win7 and are going to Win8 in situ -- for XP, you have to take the morally-superior manual "stick shift" High Road.) Reload your first application's data. Drive it around locally. If it's OK, rinse and repeat with the next application. Allow about a day depending on data volume and application complexity. If a given treasured application (does such a thing even exist?) is reluctant to run on 7 or 8 try running it "as administrator" or in "XP mode". I've never had to resort to the latter.

"Rots of Ruck", as they say.