My goal was to get a small, cheap laptop for my 4 (soon to be 5) year old to use for accessing the two or three websites that she presently likes, that could be hardened to prevent accidentally going to other websites until she actually wants that capability (like in about 6 months), and is modern enough to actually play videos etc at full speed. Here's an article from the dusty, ancient year of 2009 that covers this question:
http://blog.laptopmag.com/kids-netbook
Option 1 is the Disney Netpal, which supposedly has parental controls simple enough for even a dinosaur like myself to set up without it becoming an all-night project. The downsides are: It's pink, and it's pretty tiny (10.1-inch screen). They made a blue one as well but only the pink ones were popular enough to show up on eBay these days.
Option 2 is just a different netbook that I install some kind of parental control software on.
The Netpal is no longer made, so old stock at online stores is now oddly expensive. Units being sold on eBay were in the right price range though.
The netbook market these days has shaken out into two or three brands at most. If I'm going to give up on the Disney package, I also might as well go for something slightly bigger. That pretty much leaves the Acer Aspire One line (Asus, the maker of the NetPal, has a few options but most of them are in the 10.1-inch form factor).
Also, very unfortunately, it is already becoming difficult to get laptops with anything other than Windows 8, so I am already being pushed into the Used market. Searching for Acer Aspires with Windows 7, I liked this 11.1-inch one the best:
http://www.amazon.com/Acer-Aspire-AO756-4854-11-6-Inch-Netbook/dp/B0083PR78M/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1355682002&sr=1-1&keywords=acer+aspire+ao756#productDetails
I didn't need the 500G hard drive, but it did seem to come with a professional copy of Windows7 and more RAM. The model number A0756 seems to cover the basic model, and the particular combination of hardware and software options is varied by the style number 4854, which seems to allow for all kinds of variation of processor, memory, hard drive, and OS. Here it is on Ebay:
http://www.ebay.com/sch/Laptops-Netbooks-/175672/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=AO756-4854
Apparently, the 2899 model is much more humble, with a 32-bit Windows 7 installation, less HD and RAM, and a Celeron instead of a Dual Core processor. However, it's also about $200 less and this is mostly for use over just the coming year so this might be good enough:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Acer-11-6-Aspire-One-Netbook-877-1-4Ghz-Dual-core-2GB-320GB-AO756-2899-/271115648294?pt=Laptops_Nov05&hash=item3f1fc07d26
And because Google makes it possible to find *anything* online, here is the side-by-side comparison of these two models!
http://www.shopping.com/xSBS-acer-acer-aspire-one-11-6-netbook-2gb-memory-320gb-hard-drive-ash-black-acer-acer-aspire-one-ao756-4854-ash-black-intel-pentium-967-1-30ghz-11-6-4gb-ddr3-memory-500gb-hdd-netb~PRDLT-127171921-133374655
So, what kind of parental control software to get? What I need at this point is just simple whitelist control. Most software of course is much more feature-laden than I need. I don't need content recognition, keylogging, etc, at least right now. Here are some reviews that do a good job of showing the entire spectrum of options:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2346997,00.asp
http://lifehacker.com/5868750/how-do-i-set-up-non+annoying-parental-controls-on-all-my-devices
Whitelisting is apparently easiest to implement at the router or DNS level. I'm not sure that I am ready to do all the work necessary to implement this, but I've found some products that both implement it and have easy hole-poking options for "parental" use:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2353883,00.asp
