Out with the old, part deux

I'm not one to get rid of things just because "it's old", and I have to have the latest and greatest. (although, when the time comes for a new thing, I do typically go for the premium version, knowing I'm going to have it for a long, long time) It's a practice that comes from, among other things, any time I do get rid of stuff, invariably 2 weeks after the fact I end up needing it and have to go buy a new one.
Here is one of my laptops:
This Toshiba T4600 is a 486, 33Mhz, sports a 200MB (not GB, MB) hard drive, and is upgraded to 12MB RAM. (and you'd be surprised how well it runs Win95-I actually used to run Powerpoint and Word on this!). Compare that to my desktop which is a Pentium 4 (686), 2.53 GHz (that's 2,530 MHz), 768 MB RAM, (1) 60GB and (1) 120GB hard drives, running Gentoo Linux and WinXP. What possible use could I have for such an old machine? Well, I'm using it as I learn programming. Not only is the book I'm using a little old (but the concepts are still the same) and more suited to this machine, also should I really mess something up, such as directly manipulating files, I'm out maybe $5.
Not surprisingly, the battery in this old beast is completely shot. Usually every time I start it I have to re-set the time and date, and set the configuration. I'd like to fix this, but don't want to spend much money on such a limited-use item. More on this later....