I'm loving my $250 Thinkpad. Found it on craigslist, from a local retailer that refurbishes old laptops.

Installed SimplyMEPIS linux, and am loving it too. I also tried OpenSUSE and Ubuntu. OpenSUSE was a slow-as-molasses behemoth, and Ubuntu was so buggy and incomplete that my faith in the whole Ubuntu project was greatly diminished. SimplyMEPIS is lightweight but very intuitive, installed without any hassle whatsoever, and came bundled with nearly all the software I need including OpenOffice, Firefox, etc. The only software I had to install has been development-related.

The thinkpad is a PIII (approx 700mhz), with 15G harddrive, built-in speakers (surprisingly good), DVD/CD drive (not sure about burner, haven't even checked), PCMICA slot. The computers works great for watching videos, listening to music, etc.

Drawbacks: no built-in wifi (but a cheap PCMICA card makes this a non-issue), only 1 USB port, joystick-style mouse.

As far as wifi goes, be aware that linux in general is behind-the-curve. Do some research about what chipsets have had linux drivers successfully built for them. Hint: avoid Broadcom and Realtek chipsets. (Oh, and if you buy a wireless card, keep in mind that the card manufacturer does not necessarily = the chipset maker).

Please feel free to email me if you want any further details. Good luck and have fun!

Treepour, I think you need to check "show email in profile", since I can't see it.

The only laptop I would ever consider travelling with (and ever do travel with) is a Thinkpad, preferably from when IBM was making them (my coworkers and I have had annoying hardware problems with the new Lenovo T60p and X60 lines). From a quick browse on eBay, you can find older models that are less than $400 and would really just need some after-market memory to make it good to go. They won't ever come with SD card readers (and if you use Linux, an onboard card reader probably wouldn't work correctly yet anyway), but you can easily buy a small 12-in-1 device to handle that.

And if you decide to go with SUSE (the best distro out there :) ), just turn Beagle and zlm off and it'll be quite fast.

Oops, sorry about that. And just in case I didn't check the right box, it's treepour at gmail.

cmonkey, why is that "the only model [you] would ever consider traveling with"? Is it the build sturdiness? I don't like that they don't have a trackpad.

I am really out of my depth here, but I would make sure that the memory CAN be upgraded. I maxed my Inspiron out at 512.

Yeah cmonkey, I know. . . .

They're very durable. I have a three or four year old Thinkpad R51 that has been taken around Europe twice, as well as on several domestic trips, and I still use it as a test machine (on top of that, the person who had the R51 before I inherited it travelled with it quite a bit, too). My newish T60p has been dropped and stepped on and it's still working perfectly. My former boss seems to spend about half the year on an airplane and his 4 year old Thinkpad only recently started having screen problems because the backlight was burning out. So yeah, I've seen them hold up to travelling.

All of the models I've used have all had trackpads in addition to the trackpoints, and I'm pretty sure they don't even make a model that doesn't have a trackpad.