I have never seen a need for a lap top computer till recently. I miss having access to email (and The Chip Board) when I'm out of town and most hotels that have internet access aim them at businessmen who can pay $20-25 an hour for it. I do see that most hotel phones now have dataports on them, some even ethernet cable connections.

Can someone recommend a slightly obsolete laptop that would work well for casual web browsing and email correspondence? Would like to use at least WINDOWS 98 operating system, need 500 MBy of disk, 128Kb of RAM. Display need not be large but should have good brightness. Need a 56K modem internal of course.

I've seen some IBM Thinkpad 600's on half.com for around $600. Does anyone have experience with that model? Better yet, does anyone have a laptop in the back room that they no longer need? Will trade chips, matchbooks, and swizzel sticks or can pay cash of necessary.