OK
I aquired a notebook from my daughter its an aspire one made by acer.
it had xp that screwed up and had loads of viruses. this model doesn't have a
dvd drive so I made a usbdrive into a bootable drive and put ubuntu 12.04 on it
.
She bought a £600 laptop and a week later said dad look at my new laptop its
windows 7 she was all smug until she saw her old aspire quite happily running
ubuntu and its quicker than her present laptop. We did a trial downloading an
mp3 and a movie the aspire was faster.

YES ubuntu will go onto the laptop and it will download all drivers as the
aspire recognised all my printers HP and samsung laser printers

She now want me to install ubuntu 12.04 like yesterday. After you put on 12.04
there will be upgrade files you can download to get up to-date.