Windows 10, Memory Hogging, and the Passage of Time

When the Mac died I decided it was time to give Windows another try. I'd spent extra money getting a premium computer and it died all the same, so I tried the opposite route of getting the least expensive possible.
That turned out to be $179 (plus sales tax) - a 4 Gb of memoryWindows 10 device on sale at Target. At that price it's almost an impulse item, and I needed the computer. I took it home, set it up, and was frustrated because it was unusably slow. For example, I would click on an email to read it and wait more than a minute even for the email's checkbox to activate showing me my click had worked. I gave it a day, then took it back. Target is good about returns.
I decided to just give a heavy sigh and buy whatever was midrange for now. Next up was Costco. Their top performing machine was l6 Gig plus 4 of video memory and had a cute backlit keyboard that I knew I would soon hate; it was labelled as a gaming machine. I guessed that the extra video memory was of no use if I didn't game, which I don't, and the display was only 15". I went instead for the 17" display with 16 Gig of memory. That is what I'm using now, and it seems to perform acceptably.
My first home computer was the noisy Coleco Adam. I say "noisy" because the power supply was embedded in the printer, which ran on a daisywheel so I associated booting up with printer warm-up sounds. For all its faults it kept up with my typing. Next I got a Commodore 64 which was mostly for gaming, although I vaguely remember I justified it to myself for experimenting on  software for helping the developmentally disabled.
The first computer I got that was comparable to those I was using at work was a Franklin 800 from Sears. I went with the dual floppy drives and goes a lot of writing done on it, mostly resumes of course. Thereafter I alternated between DOS or Windows and Apple devices, and noticed that as the features improved the memory requirements went up even faster.
That's just the way it is, I suppose. My parents were of a generation that could still recall when "horsepower" referred to an actual horse, and I am of a generation that could still recall when a megabyte was "a lot" instead of "a little".