Since I made a big deal about getting a used laptop a couple of weeks ago, I wanted to share what I got for my $350. I’m quite happy with it.
Dell Latitude D600 with bag, original software (who needs it?), USB mouse, charger cable and (here’s the really random bit) a plug-in floppy drive. There’s no date of manufacture on it, but I know its not new. It is, per Ms. Theologian’s concerns, made in Malaysia.
It has a Intel Pentium M 1.6Ghz processor and 250 MB of RAM. A 20 GB hard drive, but I don’t have much on it, and have 14 of the 20 gig free.
Again, the operating system for those who are interested. I loaded Xubuntu — because the laptop had a hard time with the current Ubuntu 7.04 (Fiesty Fawn) live CD — then installed ubuntu-desktop and removed xubuntu-desktop, giving me the lucious Ubuntu Linux experience geeks and semi-geeks worldwide have come to know and love. (The difference between Ubuntu, Xubuntu and Kubuntu for that matter are the desktop environments, meaning in a nutshell the user experience and default associated programs. Xubuntu is lighter and better for old machines. But I like the GNOME environment that comes with standard Ubuntu.)
I loaded Automatix for media codecs (for compression/decompression data sets) and Audacity, which I plan to use at Day Job to help with podcasts. Most everything else is default, which itself would be dandy for many, many users.