I can say that Word takes about 2 seconds to open on my system, but I'm not running in a VM and I have 48GB RAM, so Windows can cache a lot to optimize opening times.

I bought a Dell e7440 with I7 5th gen I think and 4GB RAM. For 22,000 bucks. I had to upgrade to 8 gigs myself but 4 is pretty standard here.

Oh, and the "gaming" and productivity series of brands are usually upwards of 80,000 inr which is exortbitantly high for majority of Indians.

Just for some context, interns are paid 6-7000 bucks a month and a day labourer, unskilled earns a Max 700 bucks a day. So, a day labourer had to buy a cheap laptop for 30,000 bucks, have to work for 42 days.

Oh, and you have the last year rush for buying cheap devices for online classes, with people have 2-3 kids, buying a laptop for 50,000 times 3 is out of the question.

Again for context, cars in india start from 290,000 a maruti alto .

https://www.zigwheels.com/newcars/cars-under-5-lakhs

apple devices are rich mans luxury products here .

The reality is that any laptop with 4GB RAM and a 5400rpm hard drive and running a modern OS won't give a great user experience. ChromeOS on Chromebooks could be an exception, but even cheap Chromebooks have small EMM/eMMC cards instead of 5400rpm drives.

If you have such a system, a lightweight distro such as Lubuntu will probably give you a much better time.

For Windows 10, 8GB RAM + any SSD seems to be the minimum usable configuration.

I can't believe that over two decades after x64/64 bit was introduced that manufacturers still think it's 2001 and "4GB is just enough to qualify getting past the 4GB 32 bit limit"...

That's one reason I use linux. I am a student and I have this 4GB laptop I brought for less than INR 30,000, and linux is still super responsive on this. Windows lags for 5 seconds before pressing Windows key and search results showing up.