Hi everyone. I have a HP omnibook xe4400s laptop. Now I haven't used it for several years because it became infected with malware, spyware, and browser hijackers to the point that it became very slow and difficult to use. Additionally it was dropped a few times, although I do not know the effects of this. Now I want to give it a new life by installing Linux on it. If a laptop has a very serious infection, which hardware parts of it may be damaged? Can a computer virus/malware cause physical damage to the hardware? I think that I would need to buy a new hard drive for this computer. Obviously, a cooling fan is not affected since it is a mechanical device, however I am not sure about the CPU and RAM, since those hardware components come into direct contact with the data. I would probably need to get new hardware components for the laptop if they are outdated or if they are not compatible with the Linux OS. I would be willing to learn something about how computer hardware works if I need to manually assemble the parts. The keyboard of the laptop is missing a few keys, or rather the external plastic coverings, but that's not a really big problem for me because I want to use an external keyboard. So here are the hardware specs for the laptop.
http://www.cnet.com/products/hp-omnibook-xe4400s-15-p4-win-xp-pro-256-mb-ram-30-gb-hdd-series/specs/