The P3-500 wasn't quite bottom of the range. I was given a P3-450 system for my 21st Birthday, some 11 years ago, and a very nice machine it was at the time. It's responsible for one of my fondest PC related memories - the day I switched from Windows 98 to Windows 2000.
Once Windows 2k was installed, suddenly I could multitask for more than an hour without programs crashing, without resources dwindling to nothing, and I had system uptimes approaching a whole month =D