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 actually ended up pulling the trigger on the base model 14 inch that was announced today, but I'll probably still keep this laptop around as a tinkering device in the future. If not only because it's still fairly capable, but I've got some good nostalgia for it!
Your belief about Skype being owned by Bill Gates is kinda factually true. Not necessarily Bill Gates himself, but Microsoft acquired Skype back in 2011.
> 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. [...]
