Some cheap hardware on the web

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.

UK
There has some very good deals lately on mobile phones, mainly from Three, from Hutchinson. There was the Nokia 7600 which was available at Carphone Warehouse for £29.99 and which was quickly snapped up and out of stocked within 48 hours. The NEC 616V is available for a 3 only mobile phone. In addition to Person to Person video, it also allows audio and video streaming, video recording and playback and a built-in GPS - Global Positioning System for location-enabled services. You also have two cameras with 2x Digital Zoom and a VGA resolution. The camera supports a very large array of video and audio file formats including JPEG and MPEG 4. Both cameras have zoom and pan functions which are quite impressive. One innovative use of the Nec 616V is to find routes from one place to another. The bright 240x176 pixels TFT display helps tremendously. The screen is 35x43mm and offers 65K colours. Other features include a 131g weight, MMS, Bluetooth and Sony Duo support. The camera can also be used as an MP3 player and something tells me that combining it with a Sandisk 512MB Pro Duo card at £45.95 would get you one of the cheapest 512MB MP3 player available. The 616V also include 19MB internal memory with 4MB max for MMS messages and up to 500 contacts, a voice recorder, voice dialing and java games. On top of that you get a todo, scheduler and notepad function. Oh, and before I forget, it has a flash and can connect to your computer via a USB connection. It has a 130 hours standby time and a 100 minuets talktime. The price of this baby? £44.99 which includes a £15 airtime voucher. You can always try to unlock it and use it with your current service provider. Buy it from here.

US
PC Mall are having a special deal on a HP Pavilion P4 laptop, the ZD7010. For only $1149, you get a Pentium 4 2.66Ghz with 512KB cache, 512MB memory as well as a 40GB 4200rpm hard disk. But what made me choose this laptop is its large 17in WXGA TFT display capable of 1440x900 pixel, slightly above average. Also thrown in the pack is a DVDROM/CDRW, a network card and an integrated modem and a standard size keyboard with integrated numeric keypad. The graphic part is handled by a nVidia Geforce 4 440GO with 64Mb DDR. It should be faster than the usual integrated graphic solution but very far behind the latest Radeon 9x00 or Geforce FX series. You also get wireless connectivity courtesy of Broadcom 54G which allows 802.11g type communication. Sound is handled by a SB Pro compatible audio module coupled with Harman Kardon internal speakers. Ports include one PC slot, four USB 2.0 ports, TVO and one Firewire. Software bundled are Windows XP Hone, Intervideo WinDWD and MyDVD, HP Photosuite Toolkit and Roxio Easy CD and DVD. But that's not all, you also get Corel Wordperfect and Quattro as well as Britannica Encyclopedia, Quicken and NAV 2003. The software bundle alone is worth some serious cash. The only thing that might prevent you from buying it is its size and weight, a gigantic 15.67x10.94in and 9.3lbs. Also there is only 90 days warranty on this model as it is refurbished. To sweeten the pill, PC Mall is providing with some gifts. You get a Free Sennheiser HD437 headphone as well as a Free Sennheiser MX300 earbuds plus you get a free C86 colour printer - free after rebates of course. We had already discussed about it yesterday. In a nutshell, it is Epson's top of the range SoHo printer - economical, fast, durable and very affordable, it will provide with all that a casual user might want... And you get free shipping on everything.

Singapore

Costronic is selling an integrated motherboard, completely intergrated. The ECS L7VMM2 costs only S$88, around £25+VAT, much less than what you would pay here in the UK for a single motherboard. However, you do get a CPU for free, as if. The bundled AMD Duron 1.2Ghz might not be the best out there but it sure fits the bill if you are looking for a cheap and diiiirty base unit. The L7VMM2 comes in two flavours and I do not know which one is on sale at costronic. The only difference seems to be the lack of one PCI in the v1.1. For the rest, you get a VIA KM266 chipset with an integrated Prosavage 8 accelerator sharing up to 32MB with your actual memory. Other specs include AC97 audio module, integrated LAN, up to four USB ports, three PCI slots, one CNR and one AGP plus two DIMM slots. The board is in microATX format. Unfortunately there is no review out there to give you an exact idea what the performance of this machine would be, but we can safely guess that it would not be far off from that of an Intel P3-866MHz processor coupled with an i810 integrated chipset.

France
If you are looking forward to buy a socket 939 in France, bear in mind that you are going to pay a hefty premium that might buy you two or three additional CPU grades, had you chosen the s754 route. The cheapest s939 in France is the MSI K8T Neo2-FIR featuring the VIA K8T800Pro chipset. It costs 114,90 € at LDLC.fr and comes with all the manuals, accessories and drivers. The board itself is fairly new and came out only two months or so ago. The K8T comes complete with an impressive set of features - 3 IDE ATA-133 ports; 4 RAID 0 & 1 capable SATA-150 ports - thanks to an additional Promise onboard Controller, USB 2.0 capable ports, 3 IEEE 1394 capable ports, 1 VIA Gigabit Ethernet port, Realtek 7.1 channel audio codec featuring S/PDIF RCA and optical type output ports. MSI also includes its own overclocking technology known as Corecell which allows you to manipulate your BIOS configurations to get out the last drop of performance out of your Processor - and it does not disappoint in this domain achieving an impressive FSB of 260MHz. Other notable featues incldue five PCI slots and one AGP one as well as four DIMM slots. The board in itself is well laid out without any major quirks. All in all, most would agree that the board is probably one of the best s939 solutions available. µ