This has been discussed in great depth here before, but wanted to mention that we very recently took advantage of a great deal at Office Depot and bought 2 Toshiba laptops for $450 each. What made the deal even sweeter was that they threw in two Canon multifunction printers for free (after rebates, of course).
The laptops have Celeron 1.6GHz processors, 512MB ram, an 80GB drive, and a DVD+-/RAM burner. They were preloaded with Vista Basic and booting took about 5 minutes. Very slow in most respects.
Yesterday I reformatted and put in XPpro. Toshiba made life difficult by not making XP drivers readily obvious, but a vigorous user community (kind of like this one) on another board showed the way.
The difference is almost unbelievable. Even with Office and ZoneAlarm suite installed, the boot times are maybe a minute and desktop performance is snappy. The keyboard is great and the widescreen display is glossy and brilliant. And for $450.
I wouldn't want to edit a big HDV project on it in m2t mode, but for most purposes they're terrific.
The laptops have Celeron 1.6GHz processors, 512MB ram, an 80GB drive, and a DVD+-/RAM burner. They were preloaded with Vista Basic and booting took about 5 minutes. Very slow in most respects.
Yesterday I reformatted and put in XPpro. Toshiba made life difficult by not making XP drivers readily obvious, but a vigorous user community (kind of like this one) on another board showed the way.
The difference is almost unbelievable. Even with Office and ZoneAlarm suite installed, the boot times are maybe a minute and desktop performance is snappy. The keyboard is great and the widescreen display is glossy and brilliant. And for $450.
I wouldn't want to edit a big HDV project on it in m2t mode, but for most purposes they're terrific.