Special UK daily buys: Part 1

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.

Has anyone tried overclocking the Athlon 3400+ on a desktop motherboard? Lidl will soon be selling the cheapest large capacity hard disk in the UK. At £99, it is at least £10 cheaper than the nearest offer, especially when you factor in the cost of transport. The drive is the Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JB. It has a capacity of 250GB thanks to three 83GB platters and spins at 7200rpm. It has a 8MB cache memory and an average read/seek time of 8.9ms. The drive comes in retail pack rather than OEM. It also carries a full three years manufacturer's warranty with a pick up service. Get it from here. The drive is good, very good - If you need a sizable drive, you'd better take the WD2500JD which has the maximum size and blazing performance, that what digit-life says - and quite silent. Lidl is also going to sell the same hard disk in a 3.5in external casing for £149.99. But you would probably get a better deal by buying an empty shell and just put it inside.

Next on the list and still from Lidl, a Targa Visionary laptop featuring an AMD Mobile Athlon 64 3000+ processor with 1MB cache. The laptop is equipped with 512MB of PC2700 memory as well as a 60GB 5400rpm Samsung hard disk. As you might have guessed, the laptop is near to the edge but not bleeding edge. Other specs include an ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 wth 128MB memory with TVO and VGA out, a gorgeous 15in WXGA wide screen TFT display, a Toshiba Dual Format DVD writer, a 7-in-1 memory card reader as well as loads of connections - one PCMCIA slot, one Firewire port, one microphone and headphone, four USB ports, Mini PCI-Wireless LAN - 802.11 b/g, wired lan, modem and two speakers as well. Even the laptop accessories could even cost you quite a lot - a cordless optical mouse, a 64MB USB memory stick,a multi function Remote Control and a USB notebook light. As for the software package, it includes the ubiquitous Windows XP home edition, Works Suite 2004, Cyberlink Power Cinema and much more. Top this up with a 3 year manufacturer's warranty and you have quite a deal for only £999.

You might find better deals elsewhere though. If you are really dying to get your hands on a potentially upgradable socket 754 lappy, then why not try the Acer Aspire 1362LC, now available at an even cheaper price of £472+VAT. We've already talked about it earlier on but will probably be a good thing just to recap on its main features - Sempron 2800+, 256MB memory, 40GB hard disk, CDRW/DVD combo, a large 15in TFT display powered by the K8M800 chipset - which shares up to 64MB memory, wireless and wired networking as well as modem, Windows XP home but no floppy disk drive. I don't know if the processor inside is soldered on board or not, but I guess that one could fairly easily upgrade it straight to a mobile Athlon 3400+ as sold by CPU City for 180+VAT, bringing the total to £652+VAT; not bad for the most powerful portable computer in UK.

Your best bet though in this case would simply be to buy a mobile Athlon 3400+ laptop, currently the most powerful Athlon mobile processor widely available. The good news is that it is not even as expensive as you might think. What about £760+VAT for one featuring an Athlon 3400+ coupled with 512MB memory and a fast 5400rpm 60GB hard disk. But that's not all, you get a dual DVD writer and a 4-in-1 card reader. The display is a large 15.4in WXGA - Widescreen - TFT LCD with a 1280x800 pixel resolution. Graphics is powered by a Geforce FX 5700 with 64MB memory. Though it is not as powerful as an X600 or a Radeon 9700, it is still sufficient if you are looking to play DOOM in low res mode. Firewire, Windows XP USB, microphone, Wireless LAN as well as wired lan are included. The Acer Aspire 1524WLMi is not that heavy at 3.6KG but the price is more than appropriate and it packs more punch that everything you'll see at this price. µ