<p>With D now in college, we find that we care that we cannot skype. We have a lap top but it is old and huge. I’d prefer to replace that than purchase a camera for our desk top monitor.</p>
<p>Here is what I would need to be able to do:</p>
<ol>
<li> Skype</li>
<li> Some word processing</li>
<li> Internet surfing</li>
<li> Probably house an iTunes account</li>
</ol>
<p>No video games, unlikely to care about movie streaming. Don’t need every bell and whistle. Can anyone recommend a good, basic (inexpensive) laptop?</p>
<p>I have an Asus EEE Netbook and it does everything you want it to do…and it’s very portable. We use it weekly to Skype with DD.</p>
<p>DD has an inexpensive Dell purchased at Best Buy…under $500 and does it all too.</p>
<p>I have a little toshiba nb 505 netbook. Less than $280. Bought it mainly for doing some online work when traveling and now find I use it much more than my 15 inch laptop because it is so light. Makes the kitty happy as well because there is room for the netbook and the cat on my lay!</p>
<p>Best Buy has a Dell - Inspiron Laptop / AMD Athlon™ II X2 for $329 right now. 4GB ram / 320 GB hard drive, and a built in 0.3 MP webcam. Will work for your purposes.</p>
<p>You can find similar deals on Intel machines, and even find a slightly better processor like the Intel i3 for around $350-375 without too much effort.</p>
<p>I would recommend staying away from HP though, based on bad experiences with their build quality and their customer service.</p>
<p>Pretty much any laptop would do what you want, and as others have pointed out you can get some basic laptops for well under 500 bucks. Dell has lower end models that are nice, and there are off brands like Asus and such that are pretty decent IME. My wife has an HP netbook 110 that she loves, it is light and can do a lot. If you are planning on skyp’ing, you may want to find a laptop with a built in webcam rather then having to use an external one.</p>
<p>One note with the netbooks, if you decide to get one do youself a favor and get the memory upgraded! My wife’s HP netbook came with 1 gig of memory running windows 7 and it was as slow as molasses in January, it was irritating. I upgraded the memory to 2 gig (easy to do yourself and the simm cost like 25 bucks) and between that and removing all the HP bloatware, it works like a champ now.</p>
<p>GEt the HP Netbook Mini 110-3130NR that is selling in Costco. First of all, you can return it in 90 days. </p>
<p>Secondly, there is a separate operating system that you can quickly bootup and do 1 & 3 you wanted, not sure #4 can be done but it has a music player. No word processing in that separate operating system.</p>
<p>Thirdly, it has a preinstalled Window 7, if you need word processing and will work on everything you wanted, just the screen is 10 inches. My dd carries it like a book to the classes.</p>
<p>Best off all, it has a 9 hour(claimed) battery life. You just have to charge it once a day for light use.</p>