Buy a cheap portable media player, A3 printer, et all

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.

Exclusive to Argos is the uice Box Personal Media Player J. which is destined beforehand to children and tech savvy kids. At £59.99, it is relatively cheap except that it is sold for $59.95 on Amazon US by Mattel.

But the UK version comes with the MP3 starter kit which includes MP3 software, a docking station, USB attachment, a free USB SD/MMC card and 32MB of memory to convert your Juice box into an MP3 player and even a digital photo album. Available in red and blue, it will even suit some grown up kids like me. While it lacks the coolness of its more expensive siblings like Archos or Mustek, the Juice Box offer grossly similar functions. It plays preloaded cartridges called Juiceware which contains cartoons, games and even videos. At £10.39 for example, you get four cartoons and games from Argos with one cartridge per title and up to four episodes per cartridges.

It has a 2.75-inch backlight colour screen as well as a rubber bezel which should endure kids' passionate embrace and kicking without difficulties. It is small, but not easy to lose. Large navigation buttons are situated on the left of the Juicebox. Accessories provided are scarce - an AC adapter, a carrying case, a car adaptor and a pair of headphones. The maximum bitrate is 128Kb which should be enough for kids ears but not so for more demanding adult. The cards used are standard SD/MMC cards - so you can easily buy one 1GB and make your day. The Juicebox is compatible with Windows XP or Mac OSX out of the box. As for photos, they should be converted to Juicebox's proprietary JBP files up to a maximum of 57K in size. A little restrictive but better leave it to your kids.

According to reviews online, the screen has good contrast and brightness, delivering 12-bit colour at 240x160 pixels, roughly the size 1/25, the size of a laptop screen. The video uses a proprietary codec and I haven't come across a review whereby someone was able to play video from a SD card for example. On the hardware side, the Juicebox uses a 32-bit 60MHz ARM processor and its three AA batteries will last at least 15 hours for music and five for video which is great for long trips with your children at the back. And it is a small price to pay for your tranquility.

If you can travel to Wimbledon, someone on Gumtree is selling two Lexmark printers for £100. Now before saying "Yuk", these are not your usual X-series low-rated inkjet colour printers but rather high quality, Lexmark Business-oriented Optra Color 45N. These can print on A3 and A4 and have a built-in Ethernet TX network card built-in. There's one with two full cartridges. It can print up to eight mono pages and four colour pages per minute at a maximum resolution of 600x600 dpi.

This may be considered as entry level by today's standard but mind you that these are business oriented and not graphics ones. It comes with 24MB of memory as standard. What truly sets it apart is the nymber of operating system it supports out of the box. Apple, Microsoft, Novell, Linux, AIX, SCO, SOoaris, Irix, you name it. It has a 100-sheet feeder and a 150 sheet input tray. It also supports a large variety of media including the little known Hagaki cards. Of course it can print on A3 papers and up to a maximum of 297x558mm for full bleed printing. Its maximum dutycycle is 5000 pages per month. It will take on PostScript files fairly easily thanks to its 33MHz processor freeing the main CPU for other tasks. Launched in 2002 at £1199, it is barely believable that you can get one for only 4% of its original price.

Computergeeks is selling the cheapest Athlon 64 notebook yet at $849. The Compaq DP533AVR-5 comes as a refurbished 90-days warrrantied model. It features an Athlon 64 running at 1.8GHz which nakes it a 2800+ model. It comes standard with a 60GB hard disk and 512MB of memory which should be enough for most tasks. It has integrated video and audio with built in speakers as well as a CDRW/DVD combo drive.

The display is a large WXGA 1200x800 pixel 15-inch panel. It also features a large almost full size keyboard with a touch pad and a confortable wrist rest. Expansivity is good with two PCMCIAII slots and three USB 2.0 ports while you will communicate with the outer world by means of the integrated Ethernet and modem - no wireless at that price though. Windows XP HE is preinstalled and you do get some more accessories. Get it there as stocks are very much limited. Curiously though, I haven't been able to find a trace of that product on HP's website.

Thanks to Ed Wensell III for letting me know about this hard disk deal from CompUSA. A 160GB Seagate Barracuda is going for a cheap $59.99 after $70 on rebates. It has a rotational speed of 7200rpm and uses the EIDE interface.

It also includes a 3D Defense system which takes preemptive measures to ensure drive integrity and data security. Installation is also easy - Just insert the powerful DiscWizard installation software and it goes to work installing your drive and optimizing your system for maximum performance. They are ot the fastest in the world, as Ed says, but do well enough for most tasks. He has several drives of various sizes that are in the same series as this one, and they are all extremely quiet.

A real boon in todays very loud hardware world. Unfortunately the rebates are one per customer/household. If one can wait long enough these drives tend to go onsale every few months. µ

Compare prices in the UK Compare prices in the USA