"I had to buy a Windows laptop last year"

It's time you ditch both Windows and Mac and installed a linux distro in it, all for free.

You will get a good robust free open source system to start with, an excellent community support and learn a lot, and I daresay, none of the problems you faced. Give it a shot.

Download a distro on a usb (visit: https://distrowatch.com)

find out your usb drive's address, burn the ISO image on the usb drive, boot and install.

You may have to spend an afternoon but at the end of that process, you will get a set of nice workable machines. As you are familiar with Mac, I suppose most things you are used to in the terminal will work for you on Linux box as well.

Go for it.