Hardware buys of the day

UK
On Ebay, there is a special one-off deal for those geekers. A guy called Matthew Holbrook is selling a complete collection of PC Plus magazine. 173 hard copy magazines starting back with issue 8 (May 1987 - 17 years ago!!!!) + dozens of DVDs, CDROMs, Floppy Disks (remember these etc). The whole lot weight is around 140Kg and the starting bid on Ebay was £29.99 with posting cost of £60. Now the bid did not attract any offers. I emailed the guy and he told me that he would probably dispose of the complete collection if plan B (selling it in local ads) fails. Now if anyone wants to collect it in Bath/Bristol, mail the guy and arrange something. £ 30 is a really cheap price to own a piece of computing history. Here is his mail. µ

France
Dual processing has carried a premium for long time until Abit BP6 arrived. A fellow Frenchman is selling a dual Processor board for €120 (around £70). It might seem cheap except when you find out that UK's ebuyer sell a better specced board for slightly cheaper and that computergeeks sold it some times back for $30, half the price. The Acorp 6A815EPD is based on a i815 chipset and supports up to 512Mb SDRAM. It has a RAID controller (up to 8 Hard disk Drives) and accepts 2 Pentium III non Tualatin processors. Those looking for a solid server board will be put off by the 512Mb memory limit. This board is really meant for those who have spare parts and who want to build a new system. Reviews are available here, here and here..

Acorp's website does not have any specs of that board, but you can find it as a manual here. µ

Singapore
This has to be the best CD burning deal ever. Videopro of Singapore is selling a 52x32x52x CD-Writer from Gigabyte with 100 48x blank CDR for SGD 73, roughly £24. Mind you, you are getting a retail version of the CD-Writer. A similar deal in UK will cost you around 30% more. The CD Writer is found here. It is a plain vanilla CD Writer with burn proof capabilities and a 2Mb cache. Also worthy is the fact that it is only 17cm deep which improves air circulation and facilitates assembly. Finally, it supports Over-Burn and Raw mode copy and writing modes of TAO, DAO, SAO and Pocket Writing which enable to backup most of data formats . The media, Star 48x, is unknown but should normally fit casual burners. µ

USA
How cheap can a digital camera be? For surpluscomputers.com, the answer is USD 5.99. In fact on purchasing Web Easy Delux, a software, you get a free Digital Superpro camera with a resolution of 640x480 pixel, a USB port and build in flash. Additionally, you can take around 30 photos. It is amazing how prices can decrease so dramatically. Ten years ago, a similar configured camera might have cost you around £1000 pounds. That same package had an introductory price of $99 back in September 2000. Reviews are available here with some sample images, here and here. Ixla.com unfortunately went tits up some time back. µ

That's all for today folks. If you do know about any special offers in any of these countries, please let me know.