Thursday's Hardware Buys

LOOKING FOR a cheap, damn cheap computer to have your own firewall or to allow your four year old kid to give way to his nascent creativity? Then why not try that IBM 300XL base unit with keyboard and mouse. OK, it is an old computer - a Pentium II 233 MMX but it carries 128MB RAM and a 2.4GB hard disk as well as two USB ports, a sound card and a network card and a CD ROM. You can drop in a Linux distro and dabble with it or for the sake of education allow your children to explore its interface without creating havoc in your document folders. The price? £14.99, six pints of a good lager. This computer is still very useful if you want to do some word processing or even log on the internet. µ

Morgancomputers.co.uk is having a digital imaging sales at its "oxford street" offices. Even though the poster outside showed the Konica models, the real star of the show was the Fujufilm Finepix models. The Finepix A405S particularly caught my attention. it features a 4 megapixel Super CCD technology with 2 million effective pixels, a 3X optical fujinon zoom, support for the latest xD-picture card and a digital zoom of 2.5x. All this for the low price of £88.11, a full £41 below the price of high street stores. Although refurbished, the camera carries a full manufacturers guarantee. However, this is not the end of the story. You can get it even cheaper at Fujifilm Refurbished digital camera shop where it sell for a shocking £74.49 inclusive of VAT and delivery. As usual, you can go to pbase to view sample images and photos. Although it is not so good in low lights and eats out batteries, its ability to produce very good images and its low price will certainly woo many, many budding photographs. Head to reviewcentre.com to read more about this superlative camera. µ

A Sports wheel from one of the better known gaming gear manufacturer at a rock bottom price. There must be a catch. At £6.49+vat, the Saitek R100 Sports Steering Wheel is the cheapest wheel you can find. For the sports loving gamer, this might be the ultimate wheel at an unseen price. It features 2 Wheel-mounted Buttons, 2 Gearshift Paddles, Gas and Brake Floor Pedals, Desktop Clamp. However, things start to get sour from here. Firstly, it connects through the gaming port which might not be present on all PCs. Secondly, it seems to have some difficulties coping with Windows XP and Windows 2000. This might be because the wheel dates back to 2000. Joystick review gives it a 70/100 with good reason. µ

Lastly, we head back to ebay where a rather special computer was offered for auction. The subject "This must be the best PC package on sale on Ebay" says it all. Unde the hood, we have a dual AMD Athlon MP1900+, 1 Gb DDR Reg Memory, 45Gb system Drive and 140 Gb video drive as well as a DVD writer and a CD Writer. On top of that you have two 19" Iiyama monitors, a panasonic VTR and a 14" monitor, The Matrox Millennium G550 DH card and the RTX Extreme Editing card, one of the most powerful NLE card from Matrox. As for software, a whole slew of them are available. The auction ended last week, but if you are interested into this one off offer, why not contact the seller, hairbear75. The normal price of this rig should probably approach £2,000. The bid was stopped at £310. µ