About 3 years ago, a coworker gave me an old acer laptop that he said "Windows wouldn't install on".
Xubuntu 9.04 installed beautifully on it.

I didn't need an extra laptop, and my kids didn't need to live in front of a screen any more than they do, so I gave it to my wife's parents. My mother-in-law has been happily using it for three years on 9.04.

Last weekend, they came to visit, and she told me it needed looking at because Hulu wasn't working any more. Rather than try to upgrade it, I decided to shrink the existing install and put 12.04 on it.

Xubuntu 12.04, sadly, wouldn't boot due to a bug with the wireless hardware that crashed the kernel. Fortunately, the bug was fixed in 12.04.1, so I downloaded that disc and installed like a champ.

The only real hiccup in the install was getting the Broadcom 4318 chip functional, which required downloading the fw-cutter packages and the appropriate firmware on a separate machine, then transferring them via USB drive. Once this was done, all the hardware is working great, including the DVD playback (which was choppy and unwatchable under 9.04).

The machine is snappy and stable; my Mother-in-law can watch Hulu, check webmail, chat with my wife, play solitaire, play CDs and DVDs, and work with documents on this old cast-off laptop, all for the price of having me as a son-in-law . She's very happy with her "new" laptop!

Thanks Xubuntu devs and all the other free software devs out there in Internet land!