Need a laptop for basic computer needs

My kid has this 2+GHz Toshiba celeron with 3GB RAM, 4500MHD video, Vista and he uses all the time. Even plays games on it.

But seeing Core 2 Duo machines on black friday for 399 why not get one of those?

As to warranty, that is your choice. My lesson is this. Get the warranty from the maker, not the store.

About laptops being fragile. They are unless we look at Toughbooks. Take any consumer laptop and drop it on the pavement. Very very few survive that.
Bob

as long as it's a fairly new chip, it should work fine for basic computing. My sister bought one of those cheap laptops (a 15" Compaq) with a 1.8GHz Celeron (celery; lol) processor, and it works reasonably well. I couldn't stand the slowness, personally, (it takes about four minutes to boot up Windows Vista home Basic) but she seems to be satisfied, and the thing only cost $300. It plays Civilization IV and Age of Empires III just fine on minimum settings (both of these are fairly demanding games), though, that probably has more to do with the excellent graphics chip than the CPU. Anyway, it should do just fine if you don't want to spend extra for something you won't fully use.

Warranties are pretty much a waste of money, in my opinion. Laptops are not exceptionally fragile or anything. But then, people tell me all the time that I don't worry enough (as if that were possible!), so I might not be the best judge of the necessity of a warranty.

real cheap items are available in VERY limited qualities and only the people that camp out get those.