Your Sunday Hardware Buys

UK
You'll probably have seen them somewhere along the road while surfing on Ebay. AMD Athlon 3200 Pro is an entirely different beast compared to the XP 3200+. You've been warned. In fact, they are most probably nothing more than AMD Duron 1.8Ghz. Valuelist.co.uk has a stock of these based on a Mercury board (AKA Kobian) for £58.61. They are build around the VIA KM266 chipset, sport an AGP slot and 2 PCI and have everything embedded including a LAN module. More importantly, they are of the micro ATX family, have only 2 DIMM sockets and have 4 USB 2.0 ports. Performancewise though, don't expect miracles. You will probably end up with something closer to a Celeron 2Ghz than to an Athlon 2000+. Now, if anyone could send me one of these babies for a test, wouldn't it be nice. If you want even more integration, you might go for the PC Chips M810L v9.0 which offers onboard RAM (256Mb of them). µ

USA
Mega Ultra Slim notebooks seem to be pretty much a wishful thinking now even with the Centrino kicking in. How I wished that someone somewhere would come forward with an updated version of the libretto micro laptop instead of having to endure paying more than $300 for a Pentium 233 MMX with 64Mb EDO ram and a 4.3Gb hard disk. If you don't give a sh...t about weight, then why not go for a slightly bigger refurbished laptop like this Averatec Athlon XP-M 1600+ notebook at $ 699 featuring the low-on-consumption XP-M mobile processor, 256MB RAM, a 30GB hard disk, a DVD/CDRW combo drive, integrated S3 video, sound, modem, LAN and kitchen sink (...). It weighs only 4.3lbs, twice the weight of the Libretto and while not a microlaptop, it does come quite close to it. It also features Windows XP Home and Microsoft Works as well. ($699 - computergeeks.com) µ

France
If you have a spare power supply or a dead Dell machine lying around and you are looking for a new not so quick computer, then you might just be lucky. For under €100, ebay.fr is proposing a Dell Dimension L500R which is a Pentium III 500Mhz, with 64Mb RAM and a 10GB hard disk, a Zip drive (remember the click of death), 2 USB ports and 4 free PCI connectors. The Power supply is assumed to be dead as it is not working. Keyboard and mouse are provided as well as a 10/100 Mbps network card. The Dimension series is Dell's entry level series as opposed to the optiplex or precision range. Moreover, Dell Support provides plenty of free downloads and ample information for the prospective buyer. µ

Singapore
At Cybermind.com.sg again, we saw a very nice I/O controller called the RocketRaid 1820, a fine product from Highpoint which allows 8 hard disks to be configured to form a superb array, all this using SATA technology. It does so at a too-cool-to-be-true S$399 (roughly £135). That card is also available at the usual places (Komplett, overclock and overclockers). Finally a 3.2Tb RAID-0 Array might not be so far in view with the help of the 8 Hitachi Desktstar 7K400 SATA 7200rpm hard disks for a total estimated price of around S$ 6600 (roughly £2200). The RocketRaid is unfortunately PCI-X only so that I will have to restrain myself to hi-end motherboards. It does support RAID 0, 1, 10, 5 and JBOD and is capable of transferring up to 1.2GB/s. If also features advanced XOR technique, advanced cache algorithm and is compatible with an ATA hard disk via a Rockethead adaptor.

If you do know about any special offers in any country listed below, please let me know.