I've bought two for myself and two directly for other folks. Had good experiences all the way around. The only one I still have is an older 233 MHz, but it has 384 MB of ram and and in all honesty, works pretty darn well with Windows XP. Takes a while to boot up, but afterwards, runs relatively well. Keeping in mind, I'm not one to have outdated computer equipment. I've been thinking about trying some of the various forms of Linux on it to see if it runs any faster. Pretty much all I do with it is look at pictures, text and PDF files, get on the internet and listen to MP3s. I also have a bunch of speaker design programs and driver info loaded. I can watch DiVX movies on it, but I can't run them quite at full screen with full smoothness.
If I was looking today, I'd probably look for something in the 733MHz to 1GHz range. That, with 512MB will run surprisingly fast. Mostly, I'd like something a bit lighter weight and thinner and with better video capability. I haven't done any music editing or mixing on a laptop, or at all in the last 5 or 6 years, but I bet you'd be surprised how well it might run with a decent amount of memory.