I bought my IBM Thinkpad R-40 a year ago for $1239 and it came with a free executive genuine leather carrying case and a lexmark color printer. It is a P4 2ghz 256mb sdram 40GB HD CD-RW/DVD-ROM Radeon 7500 32mb graphics card USB 2.0 blah blah blah. It is perfect for me and I love it. Certainly you should be able to get something similar much cheaper or something better for about the same price now, as that was a year ago. I got mine direct from IBM.com, check the clearance corner for special deals on overstocks and refurbs. I was going to just get a refurbished one, but they had these brand new for like the same money.

IBM Thinkpad > *.laptops