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.
Nothing wrong with Linux especially if you don't have to work in a Windows environment. I can almost say the same for Mac. My job was integrating office machines into our customers office. Some of the equipment mfg have spotty Mac support and admittedly we were weak in that area anyway. Windows still ruled when I quit.
I've "fixed" some of my older less computer literate friends with a Linux install. Set up right its hard to break them and if they do ball it up its cheap and easy to fix. Most of these folks only use a browser and nothing else.
