On the hardware side, you could open it up, clean the fan, re-apply thermal paste (after so many years, this will make a big difference) and maybe even upgrade the SSD if you feel like it.
That way, this laptop can easily survive another 1-3 years depending on your use-cases.
> I have been using DDG for roughly 2 years now and I always search for things technical or non-technical there first. If it does not give any result or when I know it's very technical I simply add !g to the end
I am the same, but i default to !sp (startpage.com) first.
They claim:
> You can’t beat Google when it comes to online search. So we’re paying them to use their brilliant search results in order to remove all trackers and logs. [...]