Can someone explain laptop memory to me before my brain explodes?

[Nononannette]

Hi, sorry if this has been done to death.
I've a dyslexic 12 year old who benefits from typing up his work, I'd like to buy him a small laptop but struggling to understand the new types available.
He won't be able to connect to WiFi at school (but can at home) so needs something capable of running word and saving documents to the hard drive.

I was looking at a refurbished site and it gives me choices of between 4 and 16 gb memory, and hard drives from 120gb to 1 T. Also something about a solid state drive. I have tried googling but it is making my brain hurt . Any tips gratefully received!

The Solid State drive (SSD) is a "disk" drive with no moving parts. It is smaller than traditional drives but much more robust and almost instantaneous booting up.

Main memory (RAM) is the 4 to 16 gb range. If he is only going to use it for word processing then 4GB should be enough, possibly 8GB if he wants to manipulate pictures.

My main computer has a 1TB SSD and with Windows 10, LibreOffice and several other programs installed it has 793 GBytes free.

If he is taking it to school I would go for a solid state drive between 500GB and 1TB, with 4 to 8 Gbytes RAM.

1. The 4-16 GB of memory (Random Access Memory or RAM) is used to process the actions you are asking the laptop to do. The larger the RAM the quicker it processes the action.
2. The 120 GB-1 Terabyte of memory is the size of the storage the laptop has to store all the apps, work you do etc etc.
3. There are two types of Hard Drives used to store all of 2. The Hard Disk Drive (HDD) is a mechanical storage device made up of spinning discs. This is the older type of storage. The New one is Solid State Drive (SSD) which a device similar to the flash drives you store stuff on. They dont have mechanical elements. They are the newer technology.

Hope this helps

Thank you both very much that’s so helpful. Will look at options now.
Given his age I am not going to buy one that would make me cry when he loses it/breaks it! But do want a decent system for him.