Sounds like the hard drive is going. But there's actually an easy fix for that. foes your laptop have an extra 2.5 inch drive bay?

i'm not looking to repair my old laptop.

You might end up paying a little more upfront then. Basic laptops these days only give you 8GB of ram- which hurts performance for intensive tasks.

it'll be getting extra ram put in if i need it just like my last laptop did

I mean what's your budget? The Dell Inspiron gaming is a powerhouse for the price (hexacore processor if you get the 8700h processor) there's also the Lenovo y720 which can have up to a 1060 in them which is great for you performance (make sure you either put in an SSD and a HDD or get the HDD get an m.2 SSD and install the os on there, Dell xps's look really nice and I've wanted one for a while, the Acer aspire 5 mx150 on Amazon is an amazing laptop for the price with better than integrated graphics good battery life and a low powered quad-core. There is also the new Lenovo 330 which has an amd ryzen 5 which is actually a very impressive chip for art stuff imo. Especially for the price. Though the Acer aspire 5 mx150 kinda stomps all over it.

Side note: anyone that's a computer enthusiast will tell you build a desktop. It gives you so much expandability and upgradability.

Also, hp has some laptops that ship with a HDD and an Intel optane memory module. They're great because you get SSD like performance out of a normal hard drive. That way you can get a ton of storage with not sacrificing speed!

i have a desktop i built already. i'm just looking to replace my laptop for casual/travel use.

thanks for the other suggestions though.

Then don't get anything less than an i5 or a ryzen 5 if you wanna draw with it. It's a much better experience lol. And the 8th gen processors are amazing on the Intel side.