Most laptops that ship with windows 10 are capable of running 11. I recommend finding out if the schools provides a license. When I was attending Phoenix online a couple years ago they supplied me with a windows 10 education license through Microsoft.

Saw them here in Michigan at pine knob amphitheater. It was insane.

I believe an others have said a nice 1 or 2tb SSD that is PCI based should help out. Picking up an additional 16GB of ram isn’t necessary but neither is any of this and would likely let your system last even longer. There’s also a good chance your b450 motherboard supports newer x3d variants of the 5000 series ryzen CPUs through a BIOS upgrade. If you have a microcenter you can try to snag one of the 5600x3d processors or snag a used 5800x3d or maybe one on sale.