You say old HP... what is old? 10 years or older? In that case make sure it is capable of upgrading the RAM to 16GB.
I have a old Lenovo T410 which is 11 years old, it should support up to 8GB RAM max, however it wouldn't boot even though i ordered the correct RAM modules.
Though i couldn't use them in the Lenovo, I was lucky and able to put them to use in another laptop.
Thanks for answer. I think it is 5 year old. But really slow since it only have 4 GB of ram. It is bought in Thailand, so product name is HP Notebook - 15-ay003tx.
Little info:
Intel® Core™ i7-6500U with Intel® HD Graphics 520 (2.5 GHz, up to 3.1 GHz, 4 MB cache, 2 cores)
I run Ubuntu MATE on the Lenovo Thinkpad T410 with a i5 CPU and 4GB of RAM, using a SSD and don't feel or think it's slow at all, not even with Windows 10 which i tried on it almost two years ago.
However i use only Ubuntu MATE on it now, no more Windows for me personally.