I gave my Mom an Averatec laptop several years ago and I suggested we replace XP with Linux. She only uses it for e-mail, face book and solitaire.
The only 32 bit linux disk I had on hand was Ubuntu 9.10, so I booted to the live cd to test out the hardware. Everything worked, so I ran DBAN on the hard disk and installed Ubuntu 9.10. Once that was done, I found out the repositories had nothing to update it, so I downloaded, burned and tried to install Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS. The install would not finish, but hung up in the middle of the process. I tried Ubuntu 12.04.3 and got the same thing. Then Xubuntu 13.10, same thing.
I switched gears and tried Fedora LXDE v20 and it installed, but insisted the internal WiFi hardware switch was turned off. Went to the trouble of installing “rfkill”, but that was not able to unblock the hardware (RT2500 pci).
Last attempt was Debian 7.2 and it works. Only idiot-synchrocy is when you log out a user and log in again, the WiFi won’t connect and it has to be rebooted.
Total time spent fooling around with all of this was still less than installing XP and all updates from scratch.
I forgot to mention I tried PC Linux OS also. The laptop has an AMD Sempron 2800 CPU, 80 gig HD and 1 gig of RAM.
Averatec made very bad laptops. I have one. It is terribly underpowered. Its WiFi is an internal USB card, and the switch only applies power to that (simulating insertion/removal.) I was unable to install anything but XP onto it (and it's struggling even with that.) The company was so bad that in December 2012 the company filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy and went out of business. It takes a talent for a Korean OEM to fail in producing laptops. They had that talent; their notebooks were awful.
You would be INFINITELY better off buying a modern, thin and light laptop. You can buy it with Win7 from many OEMs, or you can install any other OS onto it. But know that WinXP does not automatically optimize itself for an SSD.
For the purposes that you described (e-mail, face book and solitaire) you may need only a Chromebook or a tablet (iPad or Android.) One advantage of those is that they are stable. There is nothing to download every other Tuesday, and no need to reboot, and they don't crash, and they are far more portable.
Just make sure that 32 bit system is selected.