Today's hardware bargains

USA
You never know when you might need those handy cables. For a limited amount of time ahoy, until the end of the year, Tigerdirect.com is offering three general purpose cables for almost free after rebate - $0.01 each. At 59 inches, roughly 150cm, those cables will allow you to connect almost every component together - RJ11 to connect to telephones or modem, USB 1.1 adapters to connect to peripherals or to other computers, RJ45 adapters for network purposes.

Built by Ultra, they are all highly, portable units featuring retractable cables which extend as you pull them, so that there is tangling whatsoever. Those products even carry a twelve month warranty. Not bad for a free product.

Also on sale at tigerdirect has a refurbished Brother HL1440 laser printer. As far as peripherals are concerned, recertified seems to be the way to go. For $99.99 after rebate (less than £50+VAT), you get an outrageously fast printer for that price. The HL1440 spits printed paper at up to 15 pages per minute at a resilution of 1200x600dpi.

Its onboard 2MB memory can be expanded using industry standard DIMM to 34MB and the 250 sheet paper input capacity will satisfy even the most demanding home user. Add the support of USB, Linux, Mac and PC and you get a most potent winner. Last but not least, the printer supports manual duplexing via software driver. µ

Singapore
Our good friends from Singapore have got some superb deals on offer for this weekend. For example, the Sapphire ATI Radeon 9800PRo is offered on sale for only S$409 - roughly around £109+VAT. This is in effect a very good buy for those who cannot afford the extreme cutting edge graphics card like the X800pro. Dabs in UK sells those gems for £136+VAT. Even though the 9800Pro has been superseeded by the latest generation of GPUs, it still pack a lot of value for your pennies. Launched more than one year ago, the Atlantis 9800Pro features a 380MHz R350 core.

Outputs include VGA, TVout, DVI and though it does require external power, it does not seem to dissipate as much heat as the 5800 series for example. Even with memory, courtesy of Samsung Electronics, running at 340MHz, Sapphire did not find it necessary to have active fans for them. With 128MB memory and very special design, the Atlantis is a remarkable overclocker as is the case for most Sapphire Cards. VR-Zone achieved to overclock the card to 472/370 MHz, well beyond the normal specs. This why extremeoverclocking for example says of it that "The Sapphire Atlantis 9800 Pro is a card that we would recommend to a high performance users such as the gamers and other enthusiasts. Its very fast, does some good overclocking, and has an attractive bundle worthy of any user". The Atlantis got top scores from both that site and VR-zone. µ

UK
EI system, from PCworld.co.uk, has the lowest priced laptop computer available in UK. At £399.99, it features a VIA C3 1GHz processor - equivalent to a Celeron 633MHz, with 128MB memory, Windows XP Home, 20GB hard disk, a 24x CDROM, a 14.1" TFT display and integrated memory, video and network. It comes with four USB ports as well as one year warranty, MS Works 7.0 and a lithium Ion battery. The screen is bright and very well lit, from what I saw. Sound is courtesy of Realtek and a 56K modem is also included. Finally, at 2.7Kg, it won't break any records, except perhaps for the lowest new laptop in UK. If you want to add a DVD/CDRW drive combo as well as an additional 128Mb memory, the price will hike to £499.99, at which point it is better to look elsewhere. µ