Having more time on my hands than normal with the ongoing Covid movement restrictions, looked out an old Acer Aspire One "Palmtop" PC which I had bought many years ago on a whim, the basic model with 160Gb HD, 500Mb RAM and native Win XP operating system, had seen very little usage and was in immaculate condition, the battery had survived and appeared to have retained full capacity.
Thought it a shame to dump the unit so decided to spend a modest amount to try and resurrect.
Existing RAM was 500Mb on motherboard, added a 1Gb DIMM, max. capacity, readily available @ £10.
Replaced HD with a WD 120Gb SSD @ £20.
Decided that the unit would certainly struggle with Win 10 and really wished to try Linux anyway, thought that "ubuntuMATE" would be the best compromise from the many distros available for a low spec system.
Quite pleased with the result, full startup takes approx. 60 secs and shutdown is less than 10 secs.
Although obviously not a "flying machine" all applications open and run usably and internet browsing via Firefox is acceptable, worth the £30 outlay and as a long term Windows user gives me the opportunity to play around with other Linux distros other than RPi Raspbian which has been the case to date.
Accessing the HD and RAM memory slot involves quite a major strip down of the unit but there are a number of excellent step by step videos on U-Tube for this specific model.