Hey Drule ,have you got your laptop , last week I got to kwow a good and quite cheap laptop , the Compaq Presario C714NR Dual Core 15.4 inch Notebook :
Intel Pentium Dual-Core processor T2310 with 533MHz frontside bus, 1MB L2 cache and 1.46GHz processor speed
1GB DDR2 memory for multitasking power .
It is on sale for $500:
http://www.dealstudio.com/searchdeals.php?deal_id=66541