Tuesday's Hardware Buyers Guide

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. µ

USA
Sheer crunching performance per dollar reaches new lows on ebay.com. Feedbacks from readers are welcomed here. For around $4000 (£1860+VAT), you can get either a new 2U Dual Opteron 246 server or a second hand octo-Pentium III 700Mhz Xeon server. The former comes with two Opteron 2GHz 1MB L2 cache procesors, 2GB DDR 333 ECC registered memory, two 74GB SATA Western Digital Disks - RAIDed using a 3Ware Escalade 9500s SATA RAID controller, all mounted in a 2U rackmounted chassis with two 460w Power Supply. To confirm its server status, this custom built PC comes with two GB Ethernet NIC Connectors. To make ample use of the 64-bit power, the Fedora 64-bit core is supplied complete with drivers! On the other side, we have an old but trusted Compaq Proliant DL760 server which probably ruled its world when it was launched. With eight Xeon processors each with 2MB of L2 cache, up to 16 GB of SDRAM - 2GB ECC PC-100 supplied with this one - eleven IO slots including 8 PCI-X, twin 550W redundant PSUs and four bay hot pluggable Wide Ultra2/3 SCSI drive cages. The whole thing being built like a tank and comes in a 7U rack-mountable chassis. An integrated Smart Array Raid Controller Ultra2 complements the whole setup. For your information, the Dual Opteron scores around 24.9 on the SPECint_rate_base2000 while the Xeon 700 server scored 23.2. Pretty interesting to see that even if it is more than three year old, it still holds its ground with brand new products. In comparison, a Dell Precision Workstation 350 featuring a P4 3.06 scored only 12.3 on the same benchmark. [Golly, that was a long paragraph Desire. Almost Proustian. Ed.] µ

UK
My quest for a decent wireless bundle was over this morning when I found a black keyboard and mouse at thecomputershop.co.uk for £18.99 all inclusive - Savastore sells its for nearly twice the price at £35.24 while other places offered it for a hefty £45. The Chicony WUR0108T features an optical mouse and a nice black keyboard. Installation was straight forward. Put in batteries, remove old PS2 mouse and keyboard, plug in receiver and voila. I have not installed any dedicated software yet, but the whole thing seems to work wonders. Wirelessness is courtesy of a RF receiver. Operating range is well above the supposed limit of 1.6m at about 3m. The mouse suits both right and left hands and has three buttons and is optical. It is responsive and slightly bulkier than most mice on the market. Batteries make it heavier but make it more stable. I have noticed though that during long typing periods, the mouse cursor disappears. The keyboard is soft and perfect for long nights typing. The so called Office Buttons are ideally located and allows you to perform a number of operations that would otherwise require the mouse. Other than the usual copy/paste/cut functions, hibernation, calculator, seven multimedia and five internet buttons are also present. You will also notice that there is no num, caps and scroll lock lights. They come with the software to be installed. Overall a superbly designed piece of hardware. Mind you, it is the cheapest wireless optical mouse/keyboard bundle in UK by a wide margin even when compared to Ebay and Ebuyer prices. Buy one while you come. [And that one was even longer. Ed.] µ

France
Roidupc.com - what an ugly word! from the country that killed the artistocrats - has some interesing deals. Probably the better one is a Dell Latitude L400 sub-notebook featuring a Pentium III 700Mhz processor. With 256MB memory and a 10GB hard disk, it costs only a shade under €478.40 (£220+VAT) compared to the £320 that ebayers will charge you and much less than the £1600 it originally commanded. It also comes with a 12.1" XGA capable screen, an ATI Rage Mobility 4MB video module, 24x CDROM drive, external floppy disk drive, Windows 2000 Pro Operating system, a modem, LAN connection, 85 keys keyboard and loads of style. The L400 weighs only 1.6Kg, half of what you would expect in today's bulkier, similarly powered and priced laptops. Battery life is more than adequate with more than 150 minutes to be expectedThe three-year old laptop managed to get quite some awards from windows network mag or from ZDnet. Paul Thurrott, The "Window Guru", says: "The L400 is an excellent performer for anyone looking for a small and light machine. If portability is the primary concern—and it is for many frequent travelers—you can't go wrong with the L400, which comes with a variety of excellent service options from Dell". But who cares what he says? µ

Singapore
Making your way around Sim Lim Square, Singapore's puny equivalent to Japan's Akibahira, Orite digital cameras are plenty around. Sinvision, their local distributors is having a special promotion on the Orite VC5000Z which features quite interesting specifications. It is priced at S$ 399 (around £113+VAT), a full 40% off prices of similar models on sale on high street in UK. One would expect some kind of corner cutting at this price but surprisingly, the VC5000Z has some features that would make more expensive models blush. From the 5.3 Megapixels Sony Made CCD to the 1.5" TFT LCD display and the 3X Optical Samsung zoom, many details have been included to make the budding photographer's life easier. The VC5000Z also features a 4X digital zoom, adjustable shutter speed and aperture controls, movie recording capabilities though MPEG4, built-in TV out function, a lithium batery and MMC card support. No reviews of this camera exists though and it seems that its availability is limited to Asia only. µ