Friday's hardware buys

UK
Refurbished computers have never been that cheap at PC World [http://www.pcworld.co.uk]. An Albacomp 2440 base unit is selling for the meagre sum of £171.50+VAT. Now, that's cheap especially when keeping in mind that it has a DVD Drive, is powered by a Celeron 2.4GHz processor, comes with 128MB RAM and a 40GB hard disk. The system has onboard graphic and sound modules, a modem, keyboard, mouse, three free slots and two USB connections. Speakers and Windows XP home are included. And to show how confident they are of the Albacomp 2440 reliability, they are throwing in a one-year onsite warranty free. The price of the components alone is probably more and makes of this deal one of the better one, especially if you are looking for a new system from a high-street seller. The added Windows XP operating system and the onsite warranty makes it an automatic winner.

USA
The Pentium III processor has been hailed as one of the best processor family ever, probably better than its successor, the Pentium IV. Houseofcomputers [http://www.hoct.com] is selling a Compaq Evo N600C P3-1066 MHz laptop for $682, roughly £380+VAT. Specs are fairly entry level by today's standard: A 20GB hard disk, 128MB moemory, a CDROM, USB and PCMCIA slots, Ethernet, a modem, a pointing stick and a touchpad, high quality speakers, a 14.1" XGA TFT screen, one year Compaq warranty, Windows XP Pro Operating System, a full size keyboard, a li Ion battery but no Floppy disk drive. The real gem is the Pentium-M 1.066 GHz processor which should give lowly Celerons a run for their money. Released in November 2001, the N600c was hailed as one of the best laptops of its time. Its slim black magnesium alloy casing weighs no more than 2.5 Kgs. Battery life nears four hours, quite impressive when compared present laptops. Therefore it comes as no surprise that it is a past ZDnet Editor's choice.

France
Topachat [http://www.topachat.fr] sells what will soon become a midrange hard disk capacity for 172.90 Euros, less than £95+VAT. The 250GB Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 has already been dwarfed by 300GB and 400GB hard disk but it is still sizeable for almost all applications. With a 8MB buffer and a rotational speed of 7200RPM, it offers an ATA100 compatibility (not ATA133) and a serial ATA version is available. Access time is on the high side with 8.5ms. The disk is one of the most silent of its category at 30dB and though its performance is slightly less compelling than some of its competitors, the Deskstar 7K250 hard disk drive will be your ideal system drive and will find its place comfortably in a RAID 0 one Terabyte array. µ