Daily hardware bargains

IF YOU know of any good value IT sales (auctions, rebates, one-off, clearance, surplus, classified ads) going around in the United Kingdom, France, USA or Singapore, don't hesitate to contact me, at least 24 hours before the sales end.

Looking for a Digital Camcorder? You wouldn't probably think of the Teica DV4000 first. At £49.99, you can't go wrong. Add in two Ebuyer 512MB SD Cards and you would barely reach £100, including VAT. Clearly ebuyer has got a winner on its hand. The Teica DV4000 looks like a twin brother to one of the many Mustek DV products.

It combines a Digital Video Camera, a webcam, a MP3 player, a USB disk, a digital camera, a card reader and a voice recorder. With a 2.0 Megapixel CMOS sensor - which can be interpolated to a 4 MP - 2304x1728 through hardware. What is of interest to us though is the video capabilities of the camera. You can get an idea of what it might look like here.

Don't expect DVD quality though. With its unidirectional microphone and its 320x480 pixel resolution, the best you can get is a VHS definition. Still not bad if you're on a budget. The Teica DV4000 has a 1.5-inch TFT colour LCD viewfinder. It comes with 16MB internal memory which is disabled when a SD card is inserted. A 3x digital zoom is also provided though this might not be that much useful. A 10s self-timer will make sure that you can take videos or photos of yourself without losing a second.

Fortunately, no drivers are required to make it work properly and its operation is very much child-proof. Bits and pieces included are the pouch, two AA alkaline batteries - the fact that there is no flash on it means that batteries should normally last longer, shame though that filming or taking photos at night will ressemble no more than a sea of black pixels. You do also get Arcsoft Photo and Video impression as well as an AV cable to view photos and videos directly on your mum's Telly - with sound. Last but not least a 64MB SD Card. Altogether, with 3 cards bundled for £101.66, you will have a total capacity of more than 1.1GB which means, more than 10 hours of continuous VHS quality filming in your shirt pocket.

Living around Paddington in London - W2 - being on a budget and and looking for a Powerful gaming Rig, then look no further, Scott is is seilling one on Gumtree for only £499 - which translates roughly to £425+VAT. For that low price you get a Lian Li PC60 brushed aluminium midi-tower with 4 case fans (adjustable), an Enermax 340W dual fan (adjustable) power supply unit, a MSI KT3 Ultra, motherboard featuring the KT333a chipset. It has three DDR slots, five PCI and one AGP slot. The processor provided is the hugely popular AMD Athlon Barton 3000+ (2.167GHZ) which is a quite good overclocker.

Two 512MB PC2700 DDR 333Mhz CAS2 RAM modules are provided for your comfort. Graphicwise, the computer is outstanding, you get a 256MB Ati Radeon 9800 Pro partnered with 19" Iyama 1451 CRT monitor. Primary storage devices include two Maxtor hard disk drives, both of them ATA133 7200rpm Quiet Drive Diamondmax, the system drive is a 40GB one while the second one is a 80GB. Optical drives are a 16x LG DVD ROM drive coupled to a 48x16x LG CD Writer. Sound is handled by a Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! Audigy 5.1 card. Not your usual noname brand You don't get a modem but you do get a 3Com 10/100 PCI NIC. Scott has been kind enough to include a Sennheiser PC150 headphones and being a good Gamer, he has wisely decided NOT to use the integrated components which are completely bypassed and use only brand name high quality components. As input peripherals, he describe his keyboard as "some nameless thing, like out of a lovecraftian tale, but without the tentacles" while his mouse is a good Logitech MX 310 - gamers will appreciate. Buying more or less the same rig at Ebuyer will cost you more than £600+VAT.

Ebay finally has this little gem, the Cybernet Elite II zero footprint PC going for a mere £199 with VAT included in the final bid price. You will receive the Cybernet PC in its original packaging, manual, driver disk plus updated drivers supplied, plus a full legal OEM copy of Windows XP Professional with an SP2 update disk and a useful utility disk.

The Elite II has a PIII 1GHz CPU and 512Mb of PC133 SDRAM fitted. The motherboard used is a proprietary on e and uses the SIS630S chipset coupled witha socket 370. The 20Gb Maxtor drive has been wiped, repartitioned and reformatted ready for the new WinXP installation - this has already been completed up to the first reboot saving you 40 minutes of blue bar watching, so just switch on to complete.

This PC had been installed to triple boot Win98se, Win2000 and XP for testing applications and updates before they were rolled out on the network. It is unblemished cosmetically and still looks brand new. You also brand new matching black wheel mouse. Other standard features include a CDROM, dual Video support, two serial, one parallel, one PS2, one Ethernet and four USB ports. Like most laptops, you also get an internal 56K modem, integrated AC97 sound, internal speakers and a 10/100 Ethernet card. Surprisingly though, you have a PCI expansion slot using a riser card. At less than five Kg, you are getting a powerful and transportable computer for a very cheap price, especially compared to a similar configured laptop. SFFtech which reviewed it back in 2002 rated it 8/10. µ