Friday's daily cheap and sometimes cheerful buys

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

It might not be a computer peripheral per se but the Portable DVD player is bound to become a must in the forthcoming months. The Venturer DVD-100K is made by Alco International, also known as Durabrand. You won't get more information on these otherwise evasive brands. Most high street shops store their DVD products - WHSmith, Littlewoods, Argos, Woolworths etc. It is at Woolworths however that you will get it cheapest. At £89.99, it is quite affordable. Its 3.6in LCD TFT screen should allow you to watch your DVD's everywhere while the player is compatible with DVD-R and DVD-RW media. With a car plug included, those waits in the traffic won't be the same. Shame though that there is no reviews of this baby on the internet and let's hope that the manufacturers will include a TV tuner some time around in the future. Get it here.

Inkjet printers are wonderful to make those pretty calendars or greeting cards. But when it comes to office tasks, there is not much that can beat a good entry level laser printer. The crispness combined with the usual low printing price makes it ideal for cash strapped students or Small/Home offices. For these kinds of peripherals however, the cost of consummables is as important as anything else and it is absolutely essential to choose a printer with cheap and available consummables so that you don't end up plunging money into the safes of HP and the likes. Ebay is the place where you can find those kinds of bargains fairly easily. The Brother HL 2060 is not what you might call an entry level printer. It needs a fairly large space on your desktop and prints at a quick 20 pages per minutes at 600x600 dpi or if you need a better resolution, get 1200x1200 dpi at 10 ppm. It comes with both USB and parallel ports as well as leads. With 20MB onboard memory, it far outstrips what you would normally get at this price range - £50. The unit on sale at ebay is reasonably OK with one plastic cover missing but nothing to hinder performance. The unit of sale is networkable. On the whole that unit should perform on par with printers costing four times more. As a guide, its launch price four years ago was £1256, 25x more than today's price. Total media capacity is 650 pages and the HL 2060 weighs in at 15KG. Also of interest is the wide range of emulation - Postcript2, Epxon FX, PCL and HP GL. The toner is far from being expensive. Choicestationery sells a compatible one with free delivery and VAT inclusive for only £23.85 and should last for at least 6000 pages. Want even less. You can buy a 340g bottle of compatible toner which costs only £14.55 at toner top up.

Singapore

Hardwareplace is selling a P4 2.4A processor with the Sapphire Axion 9100 RS300 for only S$299. I don't have any details whether it is the three PCI slot MA26 or the five PCI slot AA38. The Axion 9100 features the ATI 9100 AGP which has a Radeon 9200 core integrated integrated in the north bridge - it is a souped down Radeon 8500 and should be the fastest integrated motherboard solution available on any platform, running somewhere around 250MHz for its core and 400MHz for the memory. You may assign from 32 to 128MB of system memory to the graphics. ITreview got a score of 5145 on 3DMark 2001, the only DirectX 8.1 core available, what you might expect from a FX5200. The board is Hyperthread and Dual memory compatible and will support 800MHz FSB via an available firmware. You have two DDR slots available for memory upgrades, one AGP slot as well as those three PCI slots. You also have two IDE sockets as standard as well as four USB 2.0 ports and one RJ45. The integrated audio is from Advance Logic and supports 5.1 audio system as well as SPDIF. As for the network controller, it is a Realtek RTL 8100c. The board in itself is a miniATX one and arguably it is a fine product. When coupled with the highly overclockable Pentium IV 2.4GHz, it should make very good platform for less than £95. The processor bundled by hardwareplace is a retail one with the stock Intel HSF. What's more, it has a 533MHZ FSB and 1MB cache - as you might guess, it is a Prescott based core, etched at 90nm. Overclocking though might not be a good idea on this board unless newer firmware from sapphiretech makes miracles.

USA
Microcentre is having two FAR - Free after rebates - deals today. The firs one is a Gigafast EE100-AXP 10/100 PCI Network card for $0 + shipping after a $8 MIR. Basically, it is a strapped down network card that should allow you to connect your computer to a network or to another computer. It supports most protocols and standards and has a lifetime warranty. The second one is slightly more interesting. it is a Belkin Wireless Notebook Network card. To the horror of many network equipment manufacturers, network cards are very often integrated on the motherboard itself making it unnecessary to buy them. The Centrino platform integrates a Wireless card so it no longer makes much sense to sell those. The Belkin F5D6020 is IEEE802.11b compatible which should allow you to communicate at reasonably fast speeds. It includes a Diversity patch antenna and has 11 selectable channels. It connects to the PCMCIA interface of your notebook and is covered by a lifetime warranty. µ