Cheapest possible laptop for internet/note taking in college.

Looking to buy a laptop for next semester. I have a desktop for gaming, so I just want to be able to surf the wifi on campus and take notes. What is the lowest price I could figure for a good piece of hardware, and do you have any suggestions?

I've seen laptops advertised as low as $350 in the past few days. Netbooks are available for a little less than this. For what you are talking about, you don't need much power or any of the latest hardware, you would even look for used machines on places like craigslist.com.

Get urself an old Dell latitude D610 off of ebay for a couple of hundred bucks. Getting long in the tooth but they are pretty sturdy workhorses.

I think he said "cheapest possible" ...not sure if that would include an SSD drive. As far as new... I suppose a netbook would work unless I was doing graphics or big spreadsheets.

But here's the thing: Performance-wise, how does the average "netbook" compare to the Pentium M generation notebooks that can be bought for similar price, say a ThinkPad T40? (or for similar size, albeit lager than a "netbook", the thinkpad X sries?) I would say that even a 4-5 year old notebook (hello discrete graphics!) is as good or better, performance wise, than your typical "netbook" and is the same price or cheaper. The only caveat is battery life is-- well-- make sure to get a new battery.