i wonder why second-hand laptops weren't considered.. it's a great way to get some real fine laptops, i.e. Thinkpads, which are sturdy, discreet and provide very nice battery life. They even have that little light, which is useful for taking notes when the lights are off. They can be bought for less then 700$, and still have a great value, not even talking about linux and open-source, which do run pretty well on thinkpads, and are a favourite amongs studes, 'cos it's free.. That's my personal opinion though.
While I have heard many people applaud the build quality of Thinkpads, I would personally never recommend one. I had one a few years ago that I purchased new for over $2000 (through my school, along with many other students in my program). These were purchased on a lease with a $500 buyout option after 2 years.
About 30% of the users returned their laptop in the first year and recieved a partial refund which most of them used to purchase different laptops. At the end of the second year barely anybody actually paid the $500 to keep their machine and many who did simply turned around and sold it on ebay.
So many things went wrong with those machines. The biggest problem was faulty screens. About half of them had to have at least one screen replaced (under our lease warrentee for the first 2 years). Some users went throught 3 or more screens. The video chip (onboard) had a tendency to glitch periodically and eventually die. There was even faulty RAM in some of the machines. The overall performance of the machine was mediocre at best compared to a similarily priced machine at the time. The screen, when it was working, was awful. I think only 2 or 3 of the machines (out of more than 30) didn't have any problems.
Most of the people I know from school bought Toshibas, HPs, even ECS once they had rid themselves of the Thinkpad. All of them were vastly superior in performance and quality (although the ECS also had some problems).
I have heard that that model of Thinkpad happened to have more problems that most, but I still would never buy one again. Luckily, IBM did give us pretty good support, and my school had laptops they would loan us (just swap the HD) when ours were broken.
EDIT: BTW, if you want to avoid the model, I can't remember the number, but it had a P4 1.6GHz, 256MB RAM, onboad video (16MB shared RAM), no wireless ethernet.