The bottom line is your budget and your intended uses of the laptop. If you only have $500 to spend then you should seriously consider a refurbished laptop. A new one will cost $600 to $700 by the time it shows up at your door.

Most college campuses these days have wireless networks. Older laptops accept wifi cards, which only cost $30. So they are easily upgradeable. Older laptops often do not have working batteries and even on new ones after a year or two the battery may not work. It usually does not matter, as you will mostly used it plugged into a wall outlet. New batteries often don't last more than 2-3 hours. Word processing, e-mail and chat require little in the way of computing resources as they only need about 8MB or RAM and little space on your hard drive. Browsing the web can be done requires only 8MB to open your browser and can be done on a laptop with as little as 64MB of RAM, but I recommend at least 128MB if you do this a lot. If you are a gamer forget about the budget as you might need as much as 2GB RAM, a graphics chip and a very, very fast CPU. Go new and get your parents to open their checkbook very wide. As a minimum you should have an Ethernet card, if you don't get a wifi card, maybe even have both. The ethernet card or connector (if it is built-in) allows you to hook up to the campus network using a cable. So, the long and short of it is type "used laptop" or "refurbished laptop" into google and see which site comes and check out the top 2-3. You might be surprised and find a decent refurbished laptops for an amazing $350.