Craptop Restoration - Acer Travelmate 5520

A few years ago i spilled rose wine on my laptop. I thought quickly and turned it off, removed the battery and left it in a dry warm place to dry out upside down. After about 24 hrs I rebooted and it loaded fine. The only thing noticeable was the clock being wrong. I reset it but it would often just change of its own accord. The laptop was still usable however. After a few months though i noticed the laptop was getting very hot during long term usage or when using programs that were hard on the processor. It began crashing due to overheating. The overheating was becoming so bad that i noticed the corner of the laptop was actually starting to deform.

The laptop was beginning to crash on very regular occasions. Eventually i couldn't even browse the web without it crashing. I bought a new laptop and this one went in the cupboard.

Two years down the line I've decided to look what i can do with my old laptop after reading various articles. I decided to experiment with Linux as id never before tried it. I knew i needed something lightweight because of the overheating problems so i decided upon XUbuntu. First thought, I wanted to completely remove everything on the laptop. I've found a program called DBAN which is essentially a boot disk. It boots DBAN and gives you a few options from zeroing the drive to complete annihilation. I wanted the drive to still be usable so I've gone for the zeroing. The laptop overheated during this process. So I raised the laptop using the TV remote to let  more air get to the vents. This time it worked a charm. When booting the laptop you get the message no operating system installed. Perfect. 

I created a boot CD for XUbuntu on my windows 7 laptop and used it to boot my craptop. It began to install and i could feel the excitement mounting. After installation i booted the Acer and i really liked what i saw. From the load screen to the desktop menus, the whole thing looked very stylish. I googled for essential things to do with a fresh install of XUbuntu and began the learning process. I was very impressed i must say. I probably used the laptop in excess of 4 hours that first time and the laptop was almost cold to touch. There was life in the old girl yet. Now I just have to decide what to use my Linux based laptop for. I would like to turn it into a terminal for programming/learning to code etc but i need to do more research on that. If you know of any good ideas then please feel free to leave a comment below.