With RAM prices going up, and probably other key components too? I doubt there will be an improvement.

I haven’t been able to afford new hardware for a few years, even secondhand has gone up in price. There was a brief blip where recent PCs that couldn’t support Win11 dropped in price (on the second hand market), but it seems like those have gone up too as sellers realised people don’t want to use Win 11, or don’t care about it.