OK so Ima take all of you guys advice and go slowly strip while masturbating and giving plasma to that Craig guy...that should work right?? ;)

But seriously thanks very much for the suggestions!! I'll look into the Pi thing...

Basically all I want is a laptop that's powerful enough to run Linux Mint 13 (can't wait till it comes out!!) and do some programming and maybe a little (dosbox/freedroid/wesnoth) gaming. The reason I want a laptop is because I'm living with a couple, so I don't wanna set up a desktop at their house, and I'd like to be able to use MY computer as school...they use deepfreeze so you can't save any settings or anything :/

I'll also look around for somehing like freegeek, and ask my CS professors if they have any suggestions :)

I don't know if Freecycle does computers, but it may be worth a shot. People want to get rid of old stuff they have no use for anymore, but they don't want to throw it away only for it to end up in landfills. Other people (like yourself) might want said stuff.

It's here http://www.dell.com/outlet and you should only consider business line models from it. Business line model Dells are far better and higher quality anyway so this shouldn't be considered a drawback.
Someone managed to get XMBC running on one so I'd imagine nearly anything is possible (for some definitions of "anything" and "possible") on them.

If you can run Windows 98 from a SD card or flash drive, the Raspberry Pi's specs look like they could handle that, or maybe Windows 2000 at the latest.

Who gives a shit what Windows it can run? It can run Linux and BSD, and that gives us pretty much all the options worth having on hardware of that nature. I'm not anti-Windows by any means, but I haven't the faintest clue why anyone would wan to run something like Win 98 SE on R Pi.

Agreed, if the OP has to go that far back to find a version that runs, it would probably be less alien to just run Linux. Plus, with either Linux or *BSD one would have much better opportunities for CSish activities.

Just a random thought. The only Linux distro I've ever used is Slax, for hacking In The Groove 2 arcade cabinets, so I don't really know anything about what the Linux distros that'll be included can and can't do.

Running an older version of Windows might work for Windows GOGs.

Oh holy crap sir/ma'am, have I got some wonderful news for you!

http://distrowatch.com/

There's stuff intended for wall wart comps and stuff intended for high end development workstations. Linux Mint 12 is probably the easiest way to get started on a desktop (without even installing anything) but take a gander at Damn Small Linux (DSL) and then go look at insane fucking hackers like these guys are doing for seriously custom installs: http://wiki.daviddarts.com/PirateBox (if anyone thinks that link is not kosher I'll remove it, or won't be offended if a mod does, I just think the tech is fucking awesome). That's just a small team, how about a custom DVR (aka Tivo): http://www.mythtv.org/ or the guys that that mythtv was "too hard": http://mysettopbox.tv/knoppmyth.html or the guys that wanted Myth on top of Ubuntu: http://www.mythbuntu.org/.

This isn't vanilla ice cream, this is 1001 flavors! The dark side may have cookies, we have everything (including cookies)!

Yes, but DosBox is very CPU intensive and it's only got a 700Mhz ARM11. All the ScummVM titles offered on GOG.com will work beautifully though.

I have a Samsung N10 that runs everything I throw at it (not including AAA games) including all of GOG catalogue. It's dual booted XP and Ubuntu so it should definately have the power you are looking for and you should be able to pick one up for pennies.

It was a good buy.