Looking to buy an old laptop for college.

[jseiser]

Ive been looking for an older laptop, that will just run ubuntu, connect to the wireless network at my school, and allow me to take notes. I was thinking 20GB HD, 256 ram, and a wireless and ethernet port are all i really require. I cant find any place in my town that has laptops this outdated, and ebay ones dont offer any assurance the battery works. If anyone has an old laptop, tell me the price and i would LOVE to purchase it and not have to use windows at my school.

[SoloSalsa]

I have something even older than what you want... Pentium Three 500MHz. It came with 6gB and 64MiB stock, but I raised it to 12gB and 256MiB. Added 802.11b card. Battery life is just over four hours in Windows, with optimization, but about three hours with a stock Xubuntu installation. It is from the old days when you could swap drive bays, so if you buy another battery, you could get seven hours out of it (the CD drive stays, floppy drive trades for second battery, not included).
I kind of liked it before, but, I spilled water on it, and the keyboard does not work. You can use an external one, but that defeats the purpose of portability. The last thing that sucks about it is the SVGA screen (I can not function with less than XGA).
Once upon a time, this would have added up to two-thousand, but now, it is worthless. If you want it, I'll charge you no more than shipping for it all (including the wireless card, RAM and HDD upgrades, AND docking station).

[ScarletPimpernell]

Ebay. Thinkpad. :KS