Need laptop advice

[Lohman446]

I'm looking to buy myself a notebook to use around the house. Nothing fancy I really only intend to surf the web with it and let my daughter watch DVDs on it while in the car. I don't need some super gaming capable machine. I just want to be able to use it wherever I want in my house with a wireless router. The kicker is that at home my main computer is on dialup, while I intend to use high speed in other areas its secondary. I'm ok with buying used but the person I would normally ask seems convinced I need a gaming machine. I have no intention of spending more than $400 on this and would like to spend less. Looking through e-bay I see some great prospects but obviously he sees something wrong with every one I ask him about. So now I come to AO for suggestions and info on what I shouldn't settle for and what I should.

[robnix]

I'm looking to buy myself a notebook to use around the house. Nothing fancy I really only intend to surf the web with it and let my daughter watch DVDs on it while in the car. I don't need some super gaming capable machine. I just want to be able to use it wherever I want in my house with a wireless router. The kicker is that at home my main computer is on dialup, while I intend to use high speed in other areas its secondary. I'm ok with buying used but the person I would normally ask seems convinced I need a gaming machine. I have no intention of spending more than $400 on this and would like to spend less. Looking through e-bay I see some great prospects but obviously he sees something wrong with every one I ask him about. So now I come to AO for suggestions and info on what I shouldn't settle for and what I should.

If size doesn't matter, you can pick up a nice Dell C840. Add another 512MB of RAM and this will be a nice setup. My wife still uses my old one and it works just fine for email and such.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Dell-Latitude-C840-Laptop-Notebook-1-8GHz-15-512MB-NR_W0QQitemZ280002028497QQihZ018QQcategoryZ38121QQ rdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

It's hefty, but solid. Get the service tag number from the seller so you can look it up on Dell's website and get the exact specs.

[robnix]

Here's a nice IBM T43 with some warranty time left:

http://cgi.ebay.com/IBM-Lenovo-Thinkpad-T43-1-8GHz-1GB-RAM-Warranty-1871_W0QQitemZ120000476910QQihZ002QQcategoryZ31554 QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

I get these for my company, very nice laptops.

[Recon by Fire]

I bought my wife a laptop off of ebay to use around the house for school and web browsing. Got a Dell B130 plain Jane notebook with 15.4" widescreen, 1.5ghz Celerly, 1gig ram, 80 gig hard drive, with dvd/cd burner. For right about $500. It was from a dealer and still sealed in the Dell box.