Two Pentium III laptops for £290, £25 Kyocera printer, more

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.

Kyocera printers have a special place in the printer world. They are the only one which have been shipping their printers without the drum - it is basically embedded in the printer - so that the amount of rubbish being sent to the bin is minimised. Its Ecosys line of printers has been quite successful mainly due to some clever marketing. The FS600 Kyocera-Mita printer is currently on sale on Ebay for only £25.

You can get it for less though as this is its BIN price. It is a used second hand printer obviously but it has been tested OK and does need a toner. These are available at choicestationery for £32.88 inc. VAT and delivery and should last at least 3600 pages.

At less than a pence per page, it makes more sense to print original copies than go to the nearest bookshop to do your photocopies. The FS600 is powered by a 50MHz PowerPC processor and at 6 pages per minute, will prove to be a good match for home users; reality checks put it at around 5 pages per minute though.

It can print at resolutions up to 600dpi and thankfully, it does not seems as bad as it sounds thanks to its KIR2 - Kyorcera Image Refinement 2. Unlike many printers in its category, the FS600 is quite small, with a footprint slightly larger than an A4 sheet. It comes with 4MB memory which can be extended using EDO RAM and is a parallel-port beast.

A guy on Gumtree is selling two laptops for £290. He/she lives in Upton Park. You can contact the person here. The first laptop is a Compaq Armada m700. The model comes with an Intel Pentium III 750MHz processor, a 24x removable CDROM drive, a 15GB hard disk drive, a 14.1-inch TFT screen and 128MB memory. It has a full size keyboard and a sizeable arm rest, and the case is made up of magnesium alloy - no place for cheap plastic here.

The m700 uses an ATI Rage mobility video module with 8MBdedicated memory. Amongst other specs, you will get an ESS sound module with two built-in speakers and microphone, a 56K fax-modem and an Intel based Network card. The Armada sheds the touchpad in favour of the IBM-like pencil rubber option. Digit-life reviewed it some times back, when it was priced at $1750 and concluded that "The M700 is a typical mid-level model with its highs and lows. The disadvantages are both in ergonomics and in the performance. The performance with the preinstalled OS is what worries me much. Among its advantages is a large display; the gap between a display's edge and a lid is so minute that your attention is never diverted".

The laptop is shipped with Windows XP instead of the original Windows 98SE so expect a major boost in performance. The seller though do not provide with any power supply. You can however buy it from ebay for only £25 here.

Also in the deal is a Dell Latitude CSX laptop. This one boosts a slower Intel Celeron 600MHz but comes with 256MB memory and a smaller 6GB hard disk drive. It comes with a 13.3-inch colour TFT screen powered by a 4MB NeoMagic video module. But it doesn't have any CDROM module which you should possibly buy on Ebay, it costs only £9.99 over here.Alternatively, why not boost up your internal disk capacity with a swappable media bay caddie with a 40GB hard disk drive installed for only £59.99 here.

Tiny is selling a huge 42-inch plasma screen for only £999 inc. VAT. It is the cheapest price but by the slimmest margin. The Tiny Optima 420 package is naked though excluding basics like stand, speakers, remote control and tuner. It is 8.5cm thin and weighs in at 30KG. Physically, it is a 107cm, widescreen 16:9 aspect screen and supports all three major viewing systems available worldwide. It can handle 1280x1024 pixels input making it ideal for computing applications as well - even with a 1.08mm dot pitch.

The IO board is impressive with two SCART connectors, Component Video, AV Composite and DSub for PC connectivity. The display is particularly brillant with a 1000:1 contast, much more than most LCD and with true 24-bit colours and a 160 degree viewing angle, matches easily the best performance of its CRT counterparts at a fraction of the bulk or the power consumption.

That might not be enough though with Richersounds also thumping on prices. They are selling the Daewoo DP42PGB silver plasma screen with at home warranty for only £999.95. Although it does not include a tuner and has no SCART port, it does include a remote control. Think that this is expensive, then just ponder over the fact that most plasma screens costs more than two thousand pounds and that one year ago, five grand was a pretty reasonable price for a 42-inch model.

Now you can start thinking about changing your room to a bigger one to accommodate that Quad plasma screen, nVIDIA-SLI Dual 6800 Ultra Rig of yours. µ