Don,

I'm partial to Toshiba laptops, have bought three of them through the years. The IBM machines are good machines, but aren't as durable if you have an accident (bang it against something or drop it.)

A 500 meg hard drive is very small for a laptop that was originally loaded the Win 98 when it was manufactured.

My newest laptop is more than two years old with Win 98 as the OS. It has a 6.4 gig hard drive, 64 meg RAM, a Celeron 400 MHz processor, an active-matrix screen for the brightness that you want (dual-scan screens are okay, but not as bright as an active-matrix), a built in 56k modem, and both a 3 1/2" floppy drive and 24X CD-ROM. It also has two PCMCIA slots for stuff like an ethernet card, as well as a USB port.

It's a Toshiba model # 2595CDT. If there are computer stores in your area that deal in used computers, and one of them has this computer or a similar one, it should be priced in the range that you're talking.

Bob