Saturday's hardware buys

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.

UK
Staples is selling a computer bundle from HP for £499 + VAT. Based on the older Celeron core, the a510 features the Intel Celeron 2.7Ghz processor with a 256MB DDR memory, a 80GB Hard disk Drive, onboard graphics, LAN and sound and a 17" monitor. It might have ended there but what separates this package from similar systems is the presence of a DVD writer and a multi function printer from HP, the HP 1205 which alone is worth around £70. Other goodies include Windows XP home, an optical mouse, mini speakers and a standard keyboard. This configyration should prove popular in the SoHo market. Add £200 and you get the t530 with a slightly beefier Celeron, a 120GB hard disk, a 15-inch TFT monitor, a card reader, and a Nvidia Geforce FX5200 graphics card with 128MB memory. µ

USA
HP again has broken new limits with laser colour printers - the Laserjet 2550L which costs south of $499 (around £300). The manufacturer's specs are pretty good even for an entry level laser printer. It provides four pages per minute for colour, 20 pages per minute for black with its 30,000 pages of monthly duty cycle. Furthermore, it has both USB 2.0 -for faster access - and parallel interfaces which further cements its position as a small office printer. Even though it is bulky and requires a strong man to carry or move it around, it is still quite small compared to earlier models. Corners have been cut though with no network interface, a rather flimsy paper tray instead of the usual drawer and uses the older four-pass technology. Costs of consumables might make you frown though with a full set costing a suggested price of $529, more than the printer itself. It would therefore probably be better to buy a new printer, strip it of the consummables you need and resell it for less than $100 and still make a profit.

Quality wise, the 2550L is better than office colour printers, bar photo printers, even on normal paper. Hardwarecentral says of it that "it isn't a cost-effective choice for an office that prints thousands of color pages, but it's a truly tempting -- if not very speedy -- one for an office that prints hundreds." µ

France
Asus, which is better known for its motherboards and barebones systems, has been selling and making PDAs for the past two years or so. One of its more popular models is the MyPal A620, succeeding to the A600, which is on sale at 1000ordi.fr for less than €290, around £175+VAT. It is based on the rapid Intel PXA255 running at 400MHz and features the latest PocketPC 2003 embedded operating system. It has 64MB RAM, 64Mb permanent ROM, one Compact Flash Type II expansion slot - useful to connect anything from Wifi card to colour cameras, a microphone and one speaker to use its advanced MP3 together with Bluetooth connection. The screen is a 3.5-inch model with a 320x240pixels resolution and capable of displaying 37,000 colors. Its Lithium Ion battery holds enough juice to power it for 19 hours. The Mypal PDA weighs only 141g and is only a half inch width. Also the Mypal A620 features two exclusive features to prevent data loss on your PDA: the Asus smartkeeper and Asus Backup. µ

Singapore
Hardwareplace.com is back today with two products. Firstly, one of the first 12x DVD writers, capable of burning 3.95GB in less than seven minutes. The TDK 12x is a DVD+R/Rw only drive costing S$235, around £65+VAT. Media is pretty scarce - 8x DVD-R disks still carry a premium, 12x DVD-R are as rare as asparagus teeth, as are Dual Layer DVD-R. With 16x DVD-R drives available as from September, the 12x is only a stop gap but will please those power hungry users. The second component is the Hitachi 180GB hard disk and costs only S$185 (less than £53+VAT). With a spin speed of 7200rpm and eight MB cache, it will be ideal for backup removeable storage or even as boot drive. A two-drive RAID-0 /1 strip using Intel's MATRIX technology would cost you only £100+VAT.

These Hitachi 180GXP desktar disks match the likes of Seagate, Maxtor or Western Dgital. µ