Advice on buying cheap laptops (other than IBM)

[t20user]

I am going to try and get a few cheap laptops for my nephew and neice this Christmas. I had a line on a couple of T20's and 570's but that fell through. I would ideally like to spend <$100 or less each so the harwdare is limited to what the market offers at that price. My experience is mostly in the T2x machines so those would be ideal.

However if I find some non IBM cheapies on Craigslist I wonder what to expect. Anyone have recommendations?

[underclocker]

Early A-series IBM's also are very nice and solid. Similar in spec.'s to the T-series, but generally a little less expensive. They are bigger and heavier than T-series.

I recently picked up an A20m, with good spec.'s (PIII, 30gb, 384MB, etc.) for $120 on eBay (including shipping).

Non-IBM, older machine - maybe HP OmniBook 4100 or 4150. PII or PIII's, not bad, very cheap.

[AlphaKilo470]

I actually use an OmniBook 4150 as my main laptop right now. It's not exactly a speed demon but it gets the job done and it's built like a tank. Specs include varying CPU speeds as low as a 300mhz Pentium II and as high as a 600mhz Pentium III (I have a PII 366), 14" XGA TFT screens and they feature trackpoint and touch pad. The keyboard is excellent and rivals that of the 600E which is regarded here as legendary. Battery life is also pretty good with my laptop getting up to three hours on the 6 year old original LiIon battery which originally had a 5.1ah capacity; much higher than a stock 600E battery. 4150s also support hot swapping with the CD rom and floppy drives.

The Toshiba Tecra 8000 is another laptop worth considering. They shipped with Pentium IIs of varying speeds and a 12", 13" or 14" TFT. The keyboard and AccuPoint (trackpoint imitation) are the only shortcomings of the Tecra 8000.

The 600E, Tecra 8000 and HP OmniBook 4150 all have the same graphics chip; a 2.5mb NeoMagic 256AV.

If you don't mind some extra bulk, the Compaq Prosignia 165 is also worth a look. They have excellent keyboards and really nice screens, have room for both a floppy and cd to be internal at same time (like A series) and the 4mb ATI graphics card does a good job scaling lower resolutions and playing back videos. Another nice feature is that the power supply is internal so you only need a power cable (uses the same 3 prong cable most ThinkPad ac adapters use). The shortcomings of the Prosignia 165 include having only one RAM slot (as opposed to two on the 600E, 4150 and Tecra 8000) and heavy weight.