I bought my mom a new cheapie Asus laptop at Best Buy last week for only $249. It has a Celeron 900 under the hood - nothing to brag about, but it will do the job for her, since she emails and browses the web - that's about it. She's currently using a 2 year old Dell Inspiron
1501 with an AMD Turion 64 mk-36. I don't know for certain, but i have a feeling the 2 year old AMD may be better than ...