Oh YES! The perfect thing he needs is a laptop found at a yard/garage sale for CHEAP. Notice the word CHEAP.
The summer before my freshman year I found a laptop manufactured in May of 1992 from the now extinct company AST. The lady selling it offered it to me for
$5! No kidding, she previously wanted $20 for it, but it was the last day and wanted to get rid of it. It was STUFFED with goodies, MS Word, PP, Excel, 4.0, a designing lab, Win 3.1, etc. I loaded other goodies into it, fixed its registry, and it became a beastly machine. Sadly the LCD ribbon tore and I had to rip off the screen and give it a monitor.
But it still is what it was.
So, I recommend he goes out and looks for one, there is still plenty of time in the summer for sales to pop up.
PS: anyone have a site I can goto to find a replacement LCD signal ribbon for it, I would like to make it mobile again.