Old used laptops

Re: "A friend in Mexico called me the other day, looking for a source of inexpensive laptops. He said there's quite a booming market for used laptops down there. Many people would prefer a small laptop over a full desktop for their home system. He thought that even if he had a source of $300-400 200-500 Mhz systems that he could mark them up 30%." I use old 386 and 486 laptops as "terminals" for my classic computers. Sure beats the size and weight of ADM-3 or an H-19, and you can pickup working 386 laptops for $10 on E-Bay (although the shipping will be $15 to $30). Z-Notes and old Toshiba laptops work nice. You can very readily buy laptops higher end than your friend's 200 to 500MHz for his price range. You can get many Toshiba 2805's (650MHz to 1GHz Pentium III's) for $250 to about $400. Those have DVD drives, USB ports, XGA active matrix screens (13" to 15") and are very serviceable machines, and very well built. Lots of older Thinkpads with Pentium II's and III's are in that same price range or less. Last weekend at a Hamfest I picked up a Toshiba 490CDT for $10. It was missing a power adapter and had a dead LCD inverter, but is otherwise fine. I picked up the power supply for $10 (same hamfest) and the inverter for $4.99 (on E-Bay, but shipping was $10). The machine is a Pentium II with 64 megs of RAM and a 4 gig drive, well worth what I will have invested in it.