Recently friend of mine gave me a netbook, it has several issues but gift is a gift and I accepted it. It was piano black, little and sturdy. After some observing and dreaming I began to investigate.
There was no visible cracks on screen or case. So I charged a bit and pushed the start button. And "bang!" it doesn't work (I generally don't have luck with this kind of situations.). With further investigation I found out that mother board is all rusty and charging port sparking. When there is nothing to lose, men destined to become beast. And I did exactly that, cleaned it harshly, yeah. For my surprise it worked! Now I have almost 15 years old netbook with gigabyte of DDRII memory.
It worked but hard drive was screaming and I did most humane thing, ended his suffering. Luckily I have spare hard drive lying around. I replaced hard drive and almost immediately installed linux on it. My choice of distro was Debian. There is no particular reason for it but I like their 'stability over bleeding edge' philosophy though one situation made me doubt in my opinion.
Some packages has problems and they're solved but latest debian update doesn't contain latest and problemless version I did it manually but it cost me about 3 minutes of my time. Luckily I don't have a better thing to do.