Cheap, ligthweight laptops?
 

I'm looking for ideas on places to buy a cheap, lightweight laptop to travel with. My regular laptop is fairly heavy and I'm looking for one that will enable me to do just the basics on the road -- use MS Word, download pics, and have decent WiFi access. I don't want to deal with carrying my own laptop on some of these trips, both because of its size and because I don't want to worry about it.

Does anyone know if there's a good resource for buying laptops that corporations no longer need? I don't care if they're slightly out of date since I only need the basics. I've been searching through ebay etc. as well, but someone suggested the corporate angle so I figured I'd look into it.

Thanks!

You might want to check out the Nokia N800 and N810 internet devices.

Its very basic in terms of functions, but it may just do.

I'd look at the Asus EEE PC. For around $399 you'll get a brand new machine with WiFi and weighs under a kilo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASUS_Eee_PC

Second hand corporate laptops can normally be found through ebay, or from some corporate resellers. A couple that spring to mind in the UK are "Morgan Computers" and "SterlingXS"

IBM's X series can be found cheaply enough (I paid £199 for a X31 - P1.7/40Gb/512). A very nice travel notebook.

However, you take a risk when buying second hand as you don't know what life that notebook has had (I'm still not sure on the state of the IBM on I have - Personally I'm inclined to ripe it out and start again).

I'd go with ScottC and seriously consider the EEE-PC. (dependning on your requirements). Word Processing, Web/WiFi won't tax the Asus much. Lots of picture downloading will as it has a limited solid state hard disk.

Both the Thinkpad X series or the Fujitsu U810 can be had for under $1K