My wife have had a laptop (some HP/Compaq from about 2009). It has been
left unused in her parent's house for years. Then we decided to try if
it still work and resume to use it, if possible. It does. Even the
battery holds (most of) charge.
This weekend I have finished its update. There are Windows Vista (I
have left them untouched on a backup partition, one newer knows for
what they can be useful) and the Ubuntu 12.04. Not there is the Ubuntu
16.04. IT was of course a two step process: the 14.04 had to be
installed first.
It's a dual core thing (a Centrino Duo) with 2 GB of RAM. It takes ages
to boot to desktop and running a Firefox on modern WWW makes fans run
on full speed. Except that it's a fine machine. Moreover, there is no
WiFi at the place where we plan to use it.
The keyboard is not bad, the 15.4" (I think) screen is OK (though it's
only 1280x800) and it can run most of stuff just fine (including the
LibreOffice; things like the Links, the JPilot or the gVim of course
work well). Not too bad for a computer older than 10 years.
