Cheap Laptops?

[ChuckDickerson]

Well, the robotics day as part of the summer camp alluded to in this thread was held last week and was a smashing success. We had 30 students in the camp and built 10 BOE-Bots (one for every 3 students). The student teams built, programmed, and competed in a day and a half. The competition was run totally autonomously (dead reckoning) and simulated a battlefield with rescue, re-supply, and recon missions. The students did an amazing job and a fabulous time was had by all! However, since this was our first year to do this many valuable lessons were learned on what to do and not do in the future.

One thing we learned was that each team needs their own laptop to program their robot. We had 10 BOE-Bot robots and only 5 laptops of various types so two teams had to share one laptop which sometimes turned into a bit of trouble. We are already looking at how to make things even better for next year and have some money left over in the budget to spend this year on things we will need next year. High on the priority list is to get as many inexpensive laptops as we can. We would like to get a BUNCH of the same laptop as cheaply as possible. The laptops do not need to be very fancy at all. All these need to do is program a robot. If it can program an FRC, Vex, BOE-Bot, etc. it will be fine. We do not need MS Office, or any other software (anti-virus, etc.) other than the basic OS. A minimum amount of hard drive space (20GB) and RAM (512MB) should be fine as well. USB ports are a must, of course. A good old RS-232 serial port might be nice but I doubt we can find one anymore. I know I have seen cheap laptops in the newspaper sale papers from Best-Buy, Circuit City, etc. for less than $500 each but have really never looked at their specs. We would like to purchase at least 5-10 of all the same (less than ~$500) laptops to dedicate to this task. We are not particular about what brand but would prefer to stick to a MS Windows machine for compatibility with the programming software.

So, what would you buy? What is the cheapest laptop you know of that will reliably program an FRC/VEX/BOE-Bot robot?