I want to find the best old laptop that will work well with the best laptop distro. I need all the following features to work and work really fast!

E-mail with attachments
Web surfing
Word processing where docs can be opened, edited and saved as MSFT Word compatible
Image viewing
Wi-Fi, and/or broadband wireless from a mobile phone provider

I basically want to pick up a good used laptop for $100 that still works and will easily support all this and doing it with a Linux distro installed on the HDD.

What distro is best? And for that distro, any suggestions for make and model laptops that you know will do it?

DSL, xubuntu

Thanks, any suggestions on old make model laptops to work well with them?

I recently tested Puppy and was seriously impressed.
Any Pentium hardware should work - shoot for 64Meg as an absolute minimum; 128M should be o.k. with all the above.

The laptop has no drives other than the hdd. I should be able to install from a CD or DVD drive on another computer to the target laptop via Ethernet.

It doesn't even have a floppy drive? Can it boot from the network?

You didn't say what is on the laptop now. This link may help:
http://marc.herbert.free.fr/linux/win2linstall.html

How would I find that out?

My personal recommendation for a distro that will work fast and smooth with
the specs of your future laptop : is Slackware 12.0 They've made huge fixes to
it. If the laptop has ethernet connection,then you can install slackware over the internet.
From there, you can pick a light window manager like fluxbox and add the rox file manager.
Good luck!

When you boot up, is there a message like "Press F12 to boot from network". If so you could set up a PXE server on another computer and either use that to install, if your distro supports it, or even download the OS each time you reboot.

Otherwise look at the link I gave you. The title of the page is "Install GNU/Linux without any CD, floppy, USB-key, nor any other removable media" which matches your situation exactly.