You might recall this post from years ago, it seems. here's a quote:

Put that together with the fact that I just "won" a laptop at eBay that will have a hard time running anything other than Windows 95 (thought it'd be a fun VB test box)... but that's another blog. "The myth of the $100 laptop." I think you can see where I'm headed. :^)

Welp, I'm afraid the myth has taken a turn for the absolute worst. I got scammed. The eBay seller unregistered and disappeared. I'm waiting for my partial refund from eBay, then I'll see if it's worth pursuing any further. But here's what I was planning to say, briefly...

There just ain't no way to get a cheap laptop without leaving the house, it seems. I wanted to slap FreeBSD on the old Toshiba that would have cost me about $80 and use that for a fun Apache development box, maybe even Tomcat. Load up vim and a web browser (maybe even just lynx/links) and voila. Instant fun.

But the pitiful hard drive (800 megs, iirc) just didn't sound like enough. So me buying a new 40 gig hard drive for the iBook so that the Toshiba could have a hand-me-down is a few bucks. Then I know I'd eventually want to try Windows 2000 on there so that I could have a roving SQL/ASP box to show off past systems to potential new customers (even if horribly slow)... that would require several more megs of RAM and another chunk of change. Then I'd probably want an 802.11 wireless card so that I could use it around the house on the Net.

Anyhow, you see how the $100 laptop is pretty much a myth, as far as where I stand. Luckily a family member has upgraded their laptop and, as luck would have it, is happy to let me have the old model, a slightly newer Toshiba than the one I "won" but really lost. Sounds like fun, but the upgrades are probably still going to cost me more than the price of the computer! Add up the cost, and you'll start to wonder why you didn't just buy some cheapo Pentium III system from the start...