This was £20 on Facebook marketplace and is a nice compact desktop designed with the usual Compaq attention to detail. After a good clean it's had some minor upgrades with parts I had laying around - the 866MHz socket 370 Pentium III was upgraded to a 933MHz part, the 128MB of PC133 SDRAM already fitted upgraded to 512MB, and the 15GB HDD replaced with a 30GB item. The latter has a slower spindle speed (5400rpm instead of 7200rpm), but the extra space allows for a dual boot with Windows 2000 and Slackware 15.0. :-) It's previously shown some signs of being a bit iffy, but after zeroing the drive and giving it some exercise the SMART stats look healthier (11 pending sectors down to 0) and it's not been as grumpy (click of death seems to have stopped); sometimes these old drives just need a bit of exercise so I'll see how it goes.
The downsides are two: firstly, there's no AGP slot, and the onboard graphics is Intel's 82816 which is a pretty hobbled option. I'll need to find a suitable PCI video card to upgrade it with. The other downside is the PSU is a proprietary 120W unit with an unusual pinout, and the one on this machine is a bit broken. +3.3V, +5V and +12V are on all the time, even when the machine is powered off, and the PSU fan runs even faster when "off". I'll need to fix this or find a replacement.
