8.1 is a good office and home office/home tasks/daw+audio editing/media player OS. The laptop in question might be old and slow but can still have a use, even if its just as a backup machine incase your main pc/laptop craps out. Debian Live has gotten me out of crap creek a number of times.
8.1 is as easy as w7 to service and tweak so heres my suggestions for a office/home uffice(and other tasks i previously mentioned,
Remove - 3rd party published drivers(except those needed by the target host hardware), uneeded keyboards and languages, nets setup, cache and temp files, winsxs backup.
Tweak - disable/delete all uneeded scheduled tasks, autologgers and winevt channels, barebone services(keep networking).
Even on a old machine with that lot done 8.1 will be fast and while it wont win any benchmarking awards it will still be good for basic office and all home user tasks, except gaming of course.
8.1 is as easy as w7 to service and tweak so heres my suggestions for a office/home uffice(and other tasks i previously mentioned,
Remove - 3rd party published drivers(except those needed by the target host hardware), uneeded keyboards and languages, nets setup, cache and temp files, winsxs backup.
Tweak - disable/delete all uneeded scheduled tasks, autologgers and winevt channels, barebone services(keep networking).
Even on a old machine with that lot done 8.1 will be fast and while it wont win any benchmarking awards it will still be good for basic office and all home user tasks, except gaming of course.