I bought a $60NZ (+ $10bag, $15freight) laptop off trademe lately.
P1 100mhz, 24mb ram, 790mb hd, FDD, poor screen, no sound, dead battery, win95, office97.
Spent the first hour fixing the BSOD's, previous user had some software to add a virtual network drive and the driver was crashing because the modem was no longer present.
Deleted a whole lot of shit, cleaned it up, and installed a couple of neat little programs.
FreeCommander (like mc for win)- essential with only a knob mouse
Notepad2 - still my favourite source editor
IE 5 - (only because Notepad2 needed a new version of Shlwapi.dll)
Foxit - pdf reader
Dev-C++ - Ide (with MinGW compiler) Its shit but it works (unlike DJGPP).
Heaps for classic dos games - Triplane Turmoil is the best, plenty of roguelikes.
It works great and is faster than win2000 on the families celeron 2gig with 256 mg ram. (except when i try compile something).
Haven't had any stability problems apart from the one I fixed. I don't know how win95 got such a bad reputation, its probably due to bad drivers giving people grief.
I'm playing around with basic Linux, pretty neat how it works in dos. Don't have a CD rom so can't install anything else. I'm sorry to say I probably wouldn't anyway because the software I've got works fine. I don't think any of the alternatives for this hardware could compare.
Its funny how all these people on the net who are used to the overhead of Xp consider such a machine unusable.