Interesting thread, and similar to one I started several years ago. We still have 2 HP laptops with Vista, and have probably a few thousand pictures on one of them. They never get used any more. Wife has been using an ipad for 3 years, and I have a couple of better laptops, for home, shop and RV.
I happen to be posting this on a Lenova Ideapad 110 laptop that I just bought in Staples last week, for $249.00. It is a 15.9", Pentium i3, 6gb memory, and 1TB hard drive. It is plenty fast for browsing, videos, email, etc. Definitely not a gaming computer, but we don't do that anyways.
Tough to find even less capable used laptops for $249.00.