Carol, I know this thread is a few weeks old but I'll chime in anyway and maybe it will be useful
I've owned an Olympus WS311m and WS331m. They both worked very well for my purposes. They take very clear recordings and they have a USB plug on them like a memory stick so you can plug them directly into your computer, so no cables or special software required to move files to a PC. They save files in WMA format, which was sometimes a pain if I wanted to play them on an mp3 player that couldn't read those files, but it's relatively easy to convert from one to the other.
Those two would be a little out of your price range (I think the 311 is "out of print" now or whatever the equivalent is for electronic devices, and the 331 is $130 on Amazon), but I think Olympus has some other recorders with less storage space that would probably be good too. Or if you can spend a little more, the newest model in that line is on sale at
Amazon for $69.
