Buying a brand new PowerBook can be a very costly thing, the newest PowerBooks can cost upwards of £2000 including VAT and the new iBook doesn't appeal to everybody, which leaves the second hand market. You can pick up some very good deals at the UK online classifieds website, http://www.loot.com, I bought my PowerBook 190 (24MB Ram, 500MB HD) for £230 from an ad I found at loot.com.
So what can you get for your money? If you have your heart set on having a colour screen the PowerBook 540c is a good choice, it features a 33Mhz 68LC040 processor a hard disk of around 500MB and can display thousands of colours at a resolution of 640 by 680. You can usually pick up one of these for about £400.
If you can live without colour then the PowerBook 190 is a very good choice, it was manufactured between 1995 and 1996 and was the last ever 68k machine Apple made. It features the same processor and HD as the 540c, but also features a 'hot-swappable' floppy disk drive that can be swapped for many different drives including the ever popular ZIP drive. Expect to pay around £250.
If you want to run system 8.0 or 8.1 then you will need a minimum of 24MB ram and at least a 68LC040 processor and further system upgrades will require a PowerPC processor.
If you need to have a PowerPC processor then the PowerBook1400 is a cost effective option featuring a PowerPC 603e at speeds of 177/133 Mhz with a built in CD-Rom and hard disk sizes of between 750MB & 1GB. The screen included is 11.3 inches and support thousands of colours. The price of one of these ranges between £450 - £700 and you can pick up some great bargains online by cutting out the middleman.
When buying second hand PowerBooks bear in mind that you may have to collect it yourself and you have no guarantee that it is in working order so check carefully before you buy, however if you are careful you can pick up some great deals.
