I was searching ebay a couple of weeks ago, looking for a cheap laptop just for web surfing and word processing. I was looking at old dells and HP's, it seems they all had problems, this ones Hard Drive didn't work the others CD-Rom was broken. Then by a stroke of luck i stumbeled upon an Apple iBook with 500 MHz, Mac os 9, and 576 mb of ram. It looked perfect. I ordered it and it came in. It was love at first sight. The iBook has a sleek white case and a lovely keybored, which is pretty spacious considering its size. The screen is 12.1 inches and is OK for word processing and web surfing. Now I realize that now apple has mac OS X leopard out and I'm still using mac os 9 :O, Mac os 9 gets what I want done. Which is just surfing with the built in airport card which works extremely well. I bought a new battery and the battery lasts around 4-5 hours. Great! The 500 MHZ is ok. I usually have icab (best web browser for mac os 9) aim and Microsoft office open at one time and it handles it ok. Sometimes it slows down when i keep switching back and forth but nothing to bad. What I love most about this laptop is that it doesn't look like it was made in 2001, it almost looks like a new macbook if your far away enough! All in all i think this would be a great choice for a college student or that's on a budget and just wants it for notes in class or typing reports. Mac OS 9 is old, but hey it gets the job done. The 500 MHz iBook are not as prone to logic board failures (the 800 MHz ones are, beware of those!) so it comforts me that I know this Ibook will give me its happy mac boot up for at least another year or so.

Happy Computing