I gave my Mom an Averatec laptop several years ago and I suggested we replace XP with Linux. She only uses it for e-mail, face book and solitaire.
The only 32 bit linux disk I had on hand was Ubuntu 9.10, so I booted to the live cd to test out the hardware. Everything worked, so I ran DBAN on the hard disk and installed Ubuntu 9.10. Once that was done, I found out the repositories had nothing to update it, so I downloaded, burned and tried to install Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS. The install would not finish, but hung up in the middle of the process. I tried Ubuntu 12.04.3 and got the same thing. Then Xubuntu 13.10, same thing.
I switched gears and tried Fedora LXDE v20 and it installed, but insisted the internal WiFi hardware switch was turned off. Went to the trouble of installing “rfkill”, but that was not able to unblock the hardware (RT2500 pci).
Last attempt was Debian 7.2 and it works. Only idiot-synchrocy is when you log out a user and log in again, the WiFi won’t connect and it has to be rebooted.
Total time spent fooling around with all of this was still less than installing XP and all updates from scratch.