I got one of these systems with a 866MHz processor for free at work. It allows up to 512MB of SDRAM. There are five PCI slots. There are three externally accessible 5.25" bays in the top of the case (when using it as a tower; otherwise they're on the right-hand side). The floppy pretty much needs to reside in the lower of these because of the height. The CD-ROM is a 48X (in mine, at least) and sits in the middle bay. The top bay could possibly hold another CD drive or a hard disk with an adapter though Compaq's quirky ideas on mounting drives could cause problems. There two 3.5" drive bays that are not accessible without removing the front cover.

The onboard video works pretty well although X.org has sometimes died when the 3D acceleration is enabled. (Switching to a console from X via Ctrl-Alt-Fn seems to cause it as does certain screensavers.) I'm still checking this out to narrow down the cause.

The onboard 10/100 interface has worked flawlessly.

I can't elaborate much on how the audio works since I haven't put much effort in checking that out yet. (I'm using it at work and find the sound feature annoying most of the time so it hasn't been a high priority. If someone really wants to know, give holler and I can look at it more closely.) YaST does seem to know it's there.

There are USB ports that I cannot report on at this time.

I'm running an old Adaptec 2940UW in the system with no problems. I had one problem with an older SCSI adapter that wouldn't run. Watch out if your adapter uses the sym53c8xx module.

While I'm not a fan of Compaq's PCs, this is one of the easiest ones that I've worked with.