Years ago I "inherited" my Dad's old laptop, a Toshiba Satellite Pro 490XCDT which originally ran Windows 95. At various times I had it running Windows 98SE and Windows 2000 but more recently I have installed Linux in order to have it running a somewhat modern OS, albeit slowly. (I have a 128MB memory module in it, which I got at clearance price from Australia(!) so the computer has 160MB RAM which is as high as it will go)
Amazingly, both of the batteries I have still work reasonably well. It does require a trick to keep the battery in place - otherwise it shifts and the computer loses power.
One of the challenges involved in getting Linux running on it is getting the X display working properly. The computer has an S3 Virge video chipset but the X drivers don't work very well on this computer, at least, and better results are obtained with the VESA driver. But getting the VESA driver configured isn't easy either. In the past I found discussions of this issue here and there on the web but no ready-to-use xorg.conf files.
For the benefit of anyone else who wants to scrape some last use out of one of these computers, here are three xorg.conf files, for Debian (whichever version I used then), Puppy Linux 4.31 and Puppy Linux 5 - they use different versions of X and therefore there isn't one xorg.conf which is good for all of them. I personally have both US and IL keyboards set up and I haven't changed that configuration - you can adjust that yourselves.