$9.99 DVD player emerges

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.

US
Outpost has two deals on offer. Thanks to US readers for that one. There is a refurbished Symphonic RSD200E entry-level DVD player. It can play DVD Video, DVD-R/RW, Audio CD and MP3 files. It comes with a 39-key remote control and has a fluorescent display with a dimmer. You can limit viewing through a V-Chip like parental locking. At $9.99, it is the cheapest that you will find. Features are what you would expect from an entry level model - high speed scan search, screen saver ???, 99 program play and random play and energy saving auto power off. Video IOs include an RCA jack, Composite out, S-Video out, Digital and Analog Out. If you don't have a DVD player, then now is the time to get one cheap. Also from outpost is a 200GB hard disk drive available at a shocking $69.99 after rebate. The Seagate ST3200822A comes in a reatail package and has a seek time of 8.5ms, an 8MB buffer and a 7200rpm. Apart from its massive 200GB capacity, it has a five years limited manufacturer warranty, one of the best in the industry. The drive includes some very interesting features - very low acoustics at 2.5bels, 3D defense system to preempt data loss and ensure drive integrity and disc wizard to guide the user into install the drive easily. Buy it here.

UK
Looking for a cheap MP3 player and radio. No need to go on Ebay - they are pretty expensive over there. Instead, hed to ebuyer and get yourself one for only £25 including VAT and delivery. The player comes as one of those neck attached unit and is said to rival more expensive brands like the Creative Muvo - comments from buyers themselves. It comes supplied with headphones which also act like a radio, a battery for the player and two for the radio itself. The LCD display actually supports only old style dos filenames trunking everything over eight characters, it is also backlit with a cool blue glow and contains plenty of information. The unit also has a built in sound equalizer for jazz, pop, normal etc. The voice recorder records low quality wave files but they are still pretty audible and they take up about 100KB per minute of audio which gives you nearly up to one day of dictation. The unit comes with 128MB of memory and is as compact as one of those USB drives. It supports VBR MP3 music as well as WAV and WMA. So basically, you can get around four hours of music if you compress it judiciously in WMA format. But it doesn;t support folders so all your music has to live in one folder. Other function include support for in-phase worddisplay, USB HDD Boot function, automatic shut down and very easy joystick like control or as one reviewer said "two-way-and-press rocker switch". The 128MB version costs £25, doubling the memory adds £15 to the price and jumping to 512MB will cost you £55. You can buy it here. here.

Singapore
Videopro is selling what seems to be the top Athlon 64 bundle available at this time. it conssists of the Athlon 64 4000+ bundled with the Abit AV8 motherboard and a cooler. The Athlon 4000+ was launched back in October and is in fact a re-released Athlon FX53 2.4GHz with a 1MB L2 cache instead of the 2.6Ghz 512KB L2 cache expected. The 4000+ is defintely a very quick model, besting easily Intel's top of the range for not much more. The motherboard bundled is the Abit AV8. With Abit being seen in the danger zone, it is the moment to buy some stuff from them. The board comes with a VIA K8T800 Pro processor and lines up four DDR DIMM socket capable of supporting up to 4GB memory. It has one AGP and five PCI slots. Onboard connectivity include two ATA133 ports, two SATA 150 RAID0 and 1 capable, eight USB ports as well as three Firewire ones. Also chucked in are one VIA Gigabit Ethernet port; Realtek 5.1 channel audio codec featuring S/PDIF optical type input/output ports; and serial, parallel, and PS/2 port support. HarcOCP reviewed it back in August and said "the ABIT AV8 turned in phenomenal scores at stock speeds while never faltering once. Again ABIT delivers a product that works exactly as advertised right out of the box. It was a great product and truly a pleasure to work with in what has not been a good year for the motherboard market overall in my opinion when it comes to quality of work. More than a couple top tier builders are having troubles turning out the quality product that once did.". The AV8 will prove to be a more than decent partner to AMD speed champ and thanks to software lke uGuru, EQ Applet or OC Guru, you will be able to tackle even higher speeds if you start delving into overclocking. µ

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