Need a cheap laptop for a dying woman (please read)

[Dew itt right]

Heatware ~ DeW itt right ~ 168-0-0
Ebay ~ dew_itt_right ~ 262-1-1

I'll try to make a long story short. This woman's name is Dawn and she's only in her 30's. I believe she's 1 of only 4 known cases of this weird degenerative disease that effects her entire body. My wife could probably give more details than I could but she's had innumerable surgerys and was told by her doctor at the Cleveland Clinic that they've tried everything they can to help. Now it's just a matter of time. She currently has a feeding tube because her stomach stopped working. She has some kind of port for injections that keeps getting infections. And she's currently maxing out on blood transfusions because her blood count keeps dropping and they don't know where it's going. She can't even leave the house now becasue her low blood level causes her to randomly pass out. She's a dear friend from our church and we'd really like to help her out.

Since she can't leave the house, her main source of sanity is staying in touch with her friends on Facebook and watching movies on her laptop. Another good friend of mine had a nice boutique laptop he was phasing out and he sold it to her for $100, which was a huge blessing. Well, she called me last week to see if I could help fix her laptop because it's not powering on. I took it but am unable to fix it. To make matters worse, the PC that belongs to her mom that she's been using in the meantime also started having problems this week so until I can get that up and running she'll have nothing.

All I need is a cheap laptop that's good enough to play DVD's and browse the internet (wireless). Please send me a price including shipping to 44646. We'd like to buy it for her for Christmas but have already gone way beyond our originally set Christmas gift budget so we need something cheap.

I plan on ebaying the old laptop as-is. If anyone might be interested in that, please let me know. It's a ProStar laptop (built from a Clevo kit) with a Pentium M 740 (1.73GHz), dedicated ATI X700 graphics, 2Gb DDR2 533, 60Gb 7200rpm HDD, a/b/g wifi, DVD-RW, and 15.4" LCD. It got to the point where to turn it on you would have to squeeze it in a certain spot and then hit the power button for it to power on. Now that doesn't work either. When you press the power button I believe a couple LED's turn on but that's it. Sounds like a loose connection but I was not able to get to where it would appear to be. It's not worth spending the money to get it fix so we're trying to cut our losses and buy her a new one.

Sorry for the novel...

 

[Snooble]

Ought to be able to find a small netbook around for a song, I'll keep my eyes peeled.

 

[phobic]

Ought to be able to find a small netbook around for a song, I'll keep my eyes peeled.

Netbooks don't have DVD players though which the OP says the woman needs/wants.

At any rate, I'll be seeing if I can find anything in the mean time as well.

 

[Marthisdil]

Drop a line to gzervali2006 - he was selling some older Toshibas with wireless and DVD-ROM drives for $100 or so. Not sure if he has any left tho.

 

[slats]

you should consider a laptop fundraiser with you church. It sounds if her story were shared with members she could possibly get something new. I'll keep an eye out though. Good luck.

 

[Dew itt right]

Wow guys! Thank you all so much for the generous offers! I would list your names to thank you publicly but for privacy's sake I won't do that. I did get a number of very generous PM's from some very kind people. I just got off the phone with one of them and can happily say the need has been met. I told Dawn about all of this and she was just thrilled so thank you all so much for your kindness. [H]ard|Forum really is my online family...