There are two major and many smaller desktop environments for Linux. KDE is more like Windows, you could try that. (sudo apt install tasksel; sudo tasksel install kubuntu-full to get a KUbuntu equivalent, or just sudo apt install kde-full for the main things. Though you may well have a colleague already using KDE.)

Unless you need it for the type of work you do, you could disable swap, or reduce it to a small amount.

(I don't have a laptop, so I can't comment on suspend.)