buying a laptop (uk)

[ilw]

I said i'd help my sister buy a laptop, but i'm not really sure of the best way to go about it.
What she wants is something cheap (£300 -£400 ballpark, preferably lower end), it must

play dvds
burn cds
run xp or at least win2k3
ethernet capable
1+ usb ports
1+ pcmcia slots

its not gonna be running games & battery life is pretty much unimportant.

I was thinking of something like 1GHz with 512MB ram, but my real problem is where to find one. All the main shops don't seem to sell old laptops, I'm wondering whether 2nd hand is the only option. I've seen a couple of refurbished laptop shops, but the choice seems very limited and the prices pretty high. Ebay doesn't seem that promising as they nearly all have dodgy disclaimers.

Any advice???

[Illuminati]

The good thing is that most laptops nowadays have all of those things :D

If it isn't going to be running games (at least graphics-intensive ones), then she can get away with a Centrino or a Celeron laptop :) which means you can get away with the lower end of the price range and still walk away with a laptop with decent specs.

The problem with most laptops is the hard drive space - Most will only have up to 20-30 GB, though if you can find a laptop with 60GB that's pretty good (for a laptop at least :( )

[ilw]

i'm not really worried about hard drive space 20GB is probably enough, I think my sisters just going to be using it for web browsing, excel, word and maybe occasionally downloading/watching a film.

[Livy]

youd be lucky to find one new, best place is probably ebay,

my brother just got one for £450, its a refurbished packard bell,
2.4ghz p4 with dvd-rw and 256mb and 40gb hdd. and 15" screen
edit
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=3713&item=6741986132&rd=1