Because I needed something to do over Christmas break and I'm a bit of a masochist when it comes to computers, I decided to snap up an older thin client and see about making it into a full-fledged Windows 98 PC. I was inspired at least in part by an earlier thread of someone using a Geode-based thin client to do much of the same, but I wanted something a little more... unique than a Geode... I ended up spending about fifty dollars total (mostly in shipping) and procured:

1 HP T5700 thin client (more on this later)
1 laptop IDE (44pin) female->female cable to break out the IDE header on the motherboard to something my storage medium can understand
1 CF-> 44pin IDE adapter
1 8GB CF card

If I remember later I'll post pictures but it's been quite a ride so far -- currently it's running a 40GB IDE laptop hard drive in lieu of the CF card as I had the card shipped to the wrong address and I won't get to that address until early January.

Installing 98 on this beast was an adventure, to say the least -- I burned through my stack of blank CDs to find something that worked. In the end I settled for booting from a 98 EBD that I burned to CD, using that to partition and format the drive, and then booting from Hiren's BootCD and loading up its baked-in Parted Magic image to copy Win98 setup along with drivers and some programs that I would use off of the flash drive I had loaded it onto, then booting from the EBD CD again (I don't have any USB floppy-related stuff, and none of the boot disks know how to handle USB CD drives anyway) and setting up 98.

I'm including a screenshot, the color scheme is from the unofficial 98 service pack. I understand some of your concern with it but I like it, so I use it. I have KernelEx and Opera 12.02 installed as well as foobar2000 0.8.3.

Now, onto the specs, the main reason I wanted this specific machine:

1GHz Transmeta Crusoe TM5800
256MB DDR-266 RAM (Windows, no matter the version, sees 240MB -- not sure why)
256MB IDE Flash, comes preloaded with Windows XP Embedded Standard SP2
VIA AC97 Audio (not the best but certainly not the worst. It's probably a lost cause for DOS games though, has a pretty okay integrated speaker for what it is)
ATi Rage XL PCI 8MB (baked into the board, there is one PCI slot but I don't have the riser kit for it)
VIA Rhine II ethernet

I've never had anything with this chip nor have I really ever heard of anyone having one. I didn't even know it existed up until a couple years back. Supposedly Transmeta once said this 1GHz chip compares to a 800MHz PIII and to be quite honest I believe it to an extent -- it feels a good deal faster than my Katmai ever did. I'd say from eyeballing the speed of the machine in general use that it's really the equal (more or less) of an 800MHz Celeron, but the PIII would be more like 700.