About a month ago, I found a scrapped gateway tower in the street while walking the dog(sometimes it's good to live in a college town). I drove by in the dead of night and it was still there, so i tossed it in the back seat, thinking that there might still be some RAM in there I could hi-jack. I opened it and found 4 gigs of ram... Googled the model number and found it had a quad core processor. Only things missing were an optics cable and a hard drive:so, picked up and optics cable for $5 and tossed in an old 40g hard drive...Only thing missing was an OS, so I made a boot disc of natty...just couldn't get it to load properly. By the time I went back to try burning another disc, it was now Ubuntu 11.10--it worked flawlessly!!
It works so good in fact, that I picked up a new mouse, keyboard, and 20.5" LED monitor for $120 and I use it for everything except work(u know, MS Office...) and for iTunes. I'm using it right now.
the compatibility with other hardware is fantastic, with the exception of a netgear wireless adapter... the model is listed as sometimes compatible, and this is not one of those times. After messing with the kernel unwrapper for longer than I care to admit, I gave up and headed to Amazon where i gleefully found a panda for $8 that, after plugging it in, was listing networks for me before I got back to the monitor...awesome!! And NO software to load!!
I'm currently running 4 Os's in my house, XP on my original desktop, Windows 7 on the netbook, iOS5 on the iPod and ubuntu11.10 on this resurrected box.
iPod is another matter altogether; iTunes just will not work thru wine or playonlinux or any of the other conversion methods I've followed on other forums.
Overall, I am most impressed with Linux considering my limited knowledge and experience, so far.