Bargain hardware buys of the day

UK
If you want to pop in and buy a fresh new hard disk after yours has gone tits up, then go streight to your nearest thecomputershop high street store. They have three hard disk offers that are quite good especially since you don't have to pay for the posting and package and considering how fragile these items are and how "delicate" some courriers are.

The first one is a called PC Essentials and is priced at only £39.99. It has an unformatted capacity of 80GB, an average seek time of 9ms, a spindle speed of 7200rpm and a buffer size of 2MB. Its two elder brother have capacities of 120GB and 160GB respectively and are sold for £59.99 and £68.99. Not far from there, sister company tiny.com is selling an Athlon laptop for £499 all inclusive.

It comes with an Athlon XP1800+M mobile processor, Windows XP Home, 256MB DDR memory, a 30GB hard disk, a Combo DVD/CDRW drive, a huge 15" XGA screen and 32MB Integrated graphics. For communication, you'll find the controversial Supanet Internet Access, a 10/100 Ethernet Port, a modem and four USB2.0 ports.

Its nine cell Li-Ion battery will get you running for a couple of hours or less depending if you watch DVD using the preloaded Cyberlink Power DVD player software. The Mediabook U340 also has a built-in microphone and two speakers as well as PCMCIA slots. Overall, it is a more sensible buy as compare to PCworld's laptop which was sold for the same price but featured a slow-trotting VIA 1GHz processor.

USA
If you plan to build your own media PC, newegg is selling a whole range of Barebone systems, most of them SFF. Their cheapest one is the MSI SLim Barebone PC Mega 651 on sale for only $140.30, half its normal retail price. It is based on the SIS651 chipset which supports Intel P4 Northwood Processor.

It also features integrated video - SIS315 - but fortunately, also an AGP4x slot and a single PCI slot. It comes with two DDR memory slots, a Realtek ALC650 5.1 channel sound module and Realtek RTL8101L LAN module. To connect peripherals, four USB 2.0 ports, two front Firewire Ports as well as the usual suspects - mic in/out, two SPDIF, VGA, serial Parallel, Line/in/out, two PS2 ports are provided. If you thought that was enough then you're wrong. The Mega 651 comes with a 6-in-1 flash card reader and when powered off can be used as a stand alone Micro-component Hifi system with its own remote control to play MP3, Audio CD and Radio. Its silver, brushed aluminium design, its large LCD screen as well as its rotational knob will make it fit easily in your lounge.

The Mega651 is smaller than the Shuttle SFF to give you a benchmark. Also as you might guess, there is not much space left inside the casing for a substantial upgrade. For a video card, you will be better off looking for a low profile one with a TV out and a TV Tuner for a full multimedia system. All in all, a very good barebone judiciously priced and well below the cost and sweat of building a similar rig from scratch.

Thoroughly over-hyped, TabletPC have been no-goers mainly because of their prices. A Tablet PC from Acer is available in France for €1759 , less than £1000+VAT. The Travelmate C111 embeds a Intel Pentium M 1GHz with 512Kb L2 cache and is based on the Centrino Platform. It has 512MB memory, a 40GB hard disk, a DVD/CDRW combo, windows XP Pro and an USB floppy disk Drive. The screen is a smallish 10.4" TFT one capable of displaying 1024x768 pixels. You also have two USB ports, blue-tooth compatibility, PCMCIA, LAN and a modem. The Li-Ion battery gives you up to 4 hours autonomy. Soundwise, it has two speakers and one microphone. Its 1.4Kg weight might be heavy for some to carry while the fact that it is covers slightly less than one A4 but has a depth of one inch might deter even more. Also note that the C111 TCI as it is called is in fact a notebook cum tablet PC as its screen rotate to become a laptop or a notebook. So that you also get a keyboard as well as the wireless stylus. The system is delivered with Windows XP Tablet Edition. µ