hp makes a celeron 750 laptop with 13.3 inch tft, dvd and 128mb ram, and 10 gigs for $1200 and stuff. sucks it only comes with a nimh battery and the video is a 4mb savage ix, but i have a similar laptop and its decent (mine is a p3-700 and with li-on batteries).
dell has their super low end system fo rlike $1000. but its like 64mb celeron 700 12 inch tft, 24x cdrom, so it sucks.
i think i saw in hot deals a celeron 500 hp laptop with 64mb, 12" tft , dvd and 5 gigs for like $700 new.
128mb so dimms are like $40 now, and a 20 gig travelstar drive to replace those crappy ones is ike $120 so i guess these are fairly decent choices.