My laptop is from 2012 too. It has got an i5 processor with 2 HT cores, so the OS sees 4 cores. I upgraded its RAM to 8GB and replaced the HD by a 1TB SSD. Good enough for what I do.

I tried a recent machine with a modern i5 and the same amount of RAM and a 1TB SSD. The owner asked me to update the OS to windows 11. It didn't seemed faster than my laptop with ubuntu 20.04.

A 10 year old laptop may be still good with enough RAM and a SSD, but I doubt recent versions of windows will run well on such machines.