Here is an update! I received the laptop. Posting from it now.
I ended up ditching the idea of using Windows 2000 at all. For some reason it just seems like this machine needs to live solidly in the pre-2000 era. So I've installed DOS 7.1 in a 2 GB FAT16 partition, and Windows 98 SE in the remaining 58 GB (the drive is 60 GB... marketed as 64, but whatever).
As a first-time experiment, I ran the "Revenge of Mozilla" utility to remove all IE shell integration. It worked quite well... all I had to do afterwards was revert the hideous custom logos it added to the bootup and shutdown. And now I have a snappy shell in my Windows 98 SE installation.
I have a nice PCMCIA 54 mbps WiFi card... one which only sticks out about a half inch from the side of the machine,which is nice! Most cards stick out at least an inch and a half, and I constantly worry about whether or not I will move my hand in the wrong direction or something and break off the card. The WiFi works great! No WPA2, of course. I have a Linksys card that can do WPA2 in 98SE but the install utility demanded I install IE 5.5. No can do!
I'm posting this from the custom RetroZilla 2.1 with TLS 1.2 encryption. So far so good; seems to work fine, although it's obviously much slower than something like Netscape 3. At idle I'm seeing 50-70 MB RAM usage... with the browser loaded it moves to 150 MB-ish. The Pentium III saves its butt somewhat. It'll work for now. It's actually much closer to what I used during my childhood, though - as a result, Vogons feels VERY nostalgic on this machine.
I have discovered that the video card does have 8 MB of RAM, which is nice! These units had either 4 MB or 8 MB, and I was really hoping that this one had the greater amount.
The sound card works, also in DOS, though with the OPL3 issues I anticipated. It's fine; this machine is only meant for casual DOS gaming, if that. I also could get used to the buttons to change the sound volume, as they seem to do it in hardware rather than making a call to the OS, but I do disagree with it from a design standpoint 🤣
Overall the machine is CLEAN. Little to no scratches. The seller was the original owner, and obviously took good care of it.
I haven't tried the battery yet. Hopefully it does indeed hold a charge. For how long will be the question.
I'll post pictures tomorrow.
World's foremost 486 enjoyer.