I paid $200 for an Acer C7, $80 for 16GB of RAM, $100 for a 128GB SSD, and $50 for larger capacity battery to end up with a portable linux box (running ubuntu 1

I paid $200 for an Acer C7, $80 for 16GB of RAM, $100 for a 128GB SSD, and $50 for larger capacity battery to end up with a portable linux box (running ubuntu 13.04 now) for under $450 that is light, fast to boot, and has reasonable connectivity (wifi, gige, 3x usb ports). This took me about an hour of reading, 45 minutes to go from sealed boxes to linux, and a small phillips screwdriver (one screw on the back to get to ram+hard drive).