Find a Laptop For Less Than $300.00
Purchasing a used or refurbished laptop on ebay is fun and exciting. I recently purchased a laptop on ebay for under $300.00. The seller was offering a used Pentium III Dell Latitude with Windows XP and Office applications installed. This laptop had 256 MB of RAM and also included a 802.11g wireless network card!
If you don't think you will need all the bells and whistles of a brand new laptop, buying a used laptop on eBay makes a lot of sense. When searching eBay, look for sellers who have at least 98% positive feedback. Do not be tempted to buy systems just because they're cheap. Anything below Pentium III is should be avoided, as Pentium III laptops can already be found for a great price on eBay.
Next consider minimum memory configuration. I highly recommend 512 Mb as your minimum memory configuration and of course more memory is better. Next, be sure to purchase a laptop with the operating system (OS) installed. Look for Windows 2000 or Windows XP.
Now, start to compare laptops for screen size. I recommend a 14 inch screen size. Many people are excited by the larger screened laptops, but fail to fully understand the impact of resolutions. Some laptops with large screens are set at very high resolutions, making them difficult to read without eye strain and therefore are more difficult to work on than laptops with smaller screens. A 14 inch screen set at 1024x768 resolution is very good to work on. Avoiding larger screens with higher resolutions can save a lot of money.
Finally, there are networking considerations. It does not make sense to purchase any laptop without WiFi wireless networking capabilities. Look for one with 802.11g WiFi. New laptops will come with this standard, but with used laptops it is an item you need to verify. A laptop without this capability is practically obsolete.
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