The Compaq Presario R3000 is an awesome laptop. With a little over $2000, 2 years ago I bought this laptop. It's 2.2GHz AMD Athlon 64 processor is still good by today's standards and it's 1GB memory (1x1024, expandable to 2x1024) is still better than what most laptops today ship with. (The graphics card is the only thing that really shows its age...)

It's survived multiple drops from 2 to 3 feet and a few drops from around 4 feet with no damage. Even though PCMCIA cards and USB devices attached cracked and/or stopped functioning, the laptop's components (including LCD screen) survived.

It survived going 2 years without being really cleaned out. When I finally unscrewed it and air-dusted it, I had so much dust (even dust bunnies) coming out that it looked like something from a dryer's lint tray.

It's a hardcore system that exceeds expectations. It's a tough system and best of all it can run Linux -- in either 32 or 64-bit modes -- without any real problems. (The SD/MS/MMC card reader doesn't work and the Broadcom is a piece of crap that takes a little bit of effort -- and binary blobs -- to make work.) I've also seen web pages saying even FreeBSD runs on it now pretty well.