I've switched motherboards *and* CPU's (single to dual core) and had no problem. XP's hardware recognition is pretty advanced, which is pretty neat. You can keep your old jalopy of an installation running on a different PC with different hardware, which is more than I can say for just about any Apple machine ever built.
Thanks for that and your other help.
The laptop certainly has a battery problem.
It may have overheated in the past which is my current problem. I don’t know.