I'm planning on buying a laptop mostly just for email, going on the internet and doing word processing. Not planning on playing anything more serious than solitaire. Can I get away with buying the cheapest laptops out there?

Get a Dell and make sure to get the 3 or 4 year support. They have the best support out there and often replace the laptop if it has issues before the support expires (usually with a better laptop). Just make sure you get 2 gigs of ram, other than that the specs really don't matter too much.