I got an HP Mini 1030NR from Best Buy for one of the kids, and it’s quite a nice little lappy. It’s not going to win any races, but it does the job nicely. Battery life is good at close to 3 hours. It comes with a 16gig SSD, which isn’t a lot but you’re not meant to install a lot on these. The point is a small, portable, cheap internet device.
It has decent hardware specs, but there seems to be a default settings issue with the camera. It’s WAY too dark, and is unusable. I found a few suggestions on the ‘net about how to resolve it. One was to manually update the driver with some driver choices. Another was to physically remove a foil lense cover, which I didn’t feel right about. The last was to open up the settings and turn the brightness up from zero, which is the default. One way of doing that was to install MSN Messenger and use Options –> Audio and Video settings to change settings. I did that since it also gives you a picture preview.
Solved well enough. Skype video now works fine.