At a couple hundred dollars a cheap, used laptop is a better buy. Lots of people are looking to get rid of an old laptop and if all you want it for is word processing that’s the way to go. There are lots of good buys out there for old laptops, Macs or PCs.
The trouble with this approach is, if you get an old laptop--no matter what you say now--you are eventually going to try to use it to do other things : surf the internet, make graphics, view photos, email, listen to short audio clips, watch short videos, etc. An old laptop is going to have performance limits in terms of these “other things” and when you come up against those limits you are going to complain that it was a bad purchase, and people will tell you what you don’t want to hear, “you need to buy a new computer.”
An old laptop (connected to a printer) can do all kinds of fabulous word processing, with an old version of MS Word for example, but when you eventually try to make it do all kinds of modern things you will run into trouble.
