My wife wants a notebook for her BDay, but we aren’t planning to spend a lot on each other’s Bdays this year. She only needs it for word processing and surfing the net and such. It needs a wireless card for our network, but that’s about it. I could, in theory, even put Linux on it, which should mean I need less processing/RAM power, right? But I’m not opposed to getting XP. Ideally, I’d like to spend around $300, but I could go more if necessary. Again, this is not a gaming machine or anything.
http://www.powernotebooks.com/
Not quite as cheap as you want, but alot of bang for your buck regardless.