Throw in more RAM and Windows 10 will likely feel snappier than Windows 7 did.
It's probable the old Windows 7 install was 32-bit while your fresh install of 10 would have defaulted to 64-bit. That combined with 10's naturally higher memory requirements means the system has less overhead to work with.
recently I've seen new laptops being shipped with 4GB. possibly with a slightly lighter (but not fully debloated) version of 10 (Home? Starter? Edu?)
I'm not sure if this is because Windows memory usage is a lot more efficient now, or if the newer processors' performances can cancel out the RAM capacity bottleneck, or if PC4-25600 + NVMe pagefiles are simply fast enough, or if manufacturers are spreading thinly during the chip shortage. but it's certainly an ongoing trend
Mother I law bought a machine with 4GB of ram, which was fine before windows 10. Now it spends all day doing page/sysfile swap from its mechanical hard drive. Basically unusable.
So here in my pocket is an 8GB stick of DDR3 sodimm for later.
32bit PAE was supported since Windows XP and initially allowed for more than 4GB of RAM to be supported, but driver issues made Microsoft put a soft-cap in 4GB under this mode[0]. But Win7 32 bits with PAE would've surely been able to use all of those 4GB fine.
It's probable the old Windows 7 install was 32-bit while your fresh install of 10 would have defaulted to 64-bit. That combined with 10's naturally higher memory requirements means the system has less overhead to work with.