I usually defrag every couple weeks so that it wouldn't take an eternity to do. I don't have many things on the laptop, anyway. xD Just some N64/GBA roms, a few documents, and an art program as well as Blender. Everything else is in Flash Drives.
I had a little notepad thing for about the same amount of time your mother had and it ran things wonderfully, odd as it is. It would get warm, but nowhere near as warm as the dell I use gets. xD My father kept compressing it because he thought there wasn't any space in the tiny thing and it wound up destroying all it's important files, so it's just sitting and rotting under my desk. We don't really know what to do with it.
It ran games like WQ and FH surprisingly well [with low graphics settings] though, despite its size, though it was an Acer so it's easier to understand that it'd be able to run some of those things if the graphics are set to moderately low. XD