Hah yeah used parts is always a hit or miss thing. And sometimes these machines are so old trying to find drivers is almost impossible.
Luckily ubuntu has them in their repos. With Windows you gotta goto the manufactures site and hope they still have the files.
I find most things 'just work' on Ubuntu. Linux can be easier to set up than Windows despite what many people think.
I use Ubuntu Mate 16.04. Yeah, Linux tends to have a repository of older drivers of all sorts of things. The one tricky thing that I recently figured out was how to unblacklist my ethernet driver on my laptop. I don't even know how my Ethernet port stopped working for like the past year or longer. But I got it working again finally some hours ago. It turned out that the Ethernet driver was on a blacklist file. So, I went into the file and removed it and then added the driver name to another file to make sure the driver would load during startup. I don't know how many hours it took me to solve that problem. But am glad I solved the puzzle.
Hah yeah I've gone through some strange troubleshooting as well on Linux. Can take hours to figure out what's wrong.. glad you got your issue resolved. Never heard of that problem.
I generally Google my problems and find forums where people discuss having similar issues if not the same exact problems.