Most laptops (especially consumer grade) will fail with the Gigabit Ethernet requirement. These days most come with Realtek chip (which is not in ESXi HCL). Even if you overcome this with a custom VIB, there is a high chance it will PSOD during the installation process.
The only laptops that I have had success installing bare metal ESXi are 2010 MacBook Pro (which has built-in Broadcom NIC) with ESXi 6.0 and 2014 MacBook Pro (which works with the Apple Thunderbolt 2 to Gigabit Ethernet adapter that also has Broadcom chip) with ESXi 6.5.
You don't say which generation the i5 is and how many cores it has. Aside from core count, there are also differences when it comes to virtualisation capabilities/performance between generations of Intel CPUs. And you need at least Westmere Arrandale/Clarkdale i5 (2010) to be able to run Workstation/Player 14/15.
If you want to learn ESXi command-line and/or have a good hands-on with ESXi, you should just use Workstation/Player and create an ESXi VM. But given that it is an i5, which most likely only has 2 cores unless it is something like a quad-core i5-6440HQ, and limited RAM (8GB), you should tone down your expectation of being able to run VMs inside the ESXi VM and being able to run multiple VMs simultaneously with Player 14/15 with a Windows 7 host.
