VERY slow older MacBook air

I have a 13 inch late 2010 MacBook air running High Sierra. The machine has a 1.86 GHz processor Intel Core 2 Duo and 2 GB of RAM. It runs so slowly that it is borderline useless, even for the simplest tasks. Safari browsing will often result in serious lags and lots of fan, even with only a single tab open, especially if there is any video involved. I have experienced this level of performance for a while, which is one of the reasons I recently did a clean install to the most updated OS available for this machine. Unfortunately it hasn't seemed to help much. I pretty much have to stick to one app at a time, and even then things are REALLY slow. Since then I've tried emptying caches and various other routine cleaning, but nothing makes much difference.

I know the machine is old, and I'm wondering if it's just time to give up on it. Maybe it was a mistake moving to the newer OS, and the hardware just can't handle it. Any thoughts, similar experiences, or ideas for extending the life of the machine further would be appreciated. Thanks.