My vacation/travel laptop is a lower-end Chromebook. Frankly, one could do nicely with a higher-end one for everything. You would have to be comfortable with Google hosting all your work, but if you were, there's no cost for any software, no personal stuff on your machine (in case it gets stolen) and the machines are much less expensive.
If you absolutely want to stick with Windows, you can get a gem or a lemon with any brand, but Dell, Lenovo, and HP seem to be good in the moderate cost division. I would urge you to not pay annual subscription costs for software, however. Open source and free packages like Libre Office do everything that MS's bloated monster does - even being able to read and save in MS file formats.
I cannot help but suggest that you dump Windows altogether and run Linux Mint as your OS. But some here seem to not like that advice.
