Someone in my building trashed their cheap 2010 laptop. It is a Packard Bell New90 EasyNote TM86. It had no drive, but otherwise was in good condition. Whoever disposed of it was even kind enough to put the drive cage and screws in disk compartment.
I installed an older Samsung EVO 840 250GB SSD in the laptop. I then installed Windows 10 Pro on it and was pleasantly surprised it was already activated. Laptop worked fine, but felt sluggish. It came with Pentium P6000 (35 watt dual-core 1.86GHz CPU). It got 103 CPU score in Cinebench R15. After some research, I found out I can upgrade the CPU and ordered an Intel Core i7-720QM (45 watt quad-code 1.6GHz CPU with Turbo Boost up to 2.8GHz) on eBay. It was a bit pricy: 38 CAD shipped from China. Installing it was quite painful, mostly due to fragile black plastic that broke in many places. I ended up following this video. I swapped the CPU, applied fresh thermal compound and reassembled the laptop. All seems to work fine after the reassembly. I had to use a bit of duct tape on a cracked plastic hinge. Cinebench R15 score went from 103 to 256. This is respectable for a laptop even today. I’m thinking of giving it away to a family member, if they’ll accept it.
There is also a service manual available for this laptop. I didn’t feel like reading it.