There's no excuse: the time to go Gigabit Ethernet is now

AFTER A BRIEF hiatus, the Cheap B*stard is back with you, with some deals for our readers in America that I wouldn't let pass -if I had the money. Still stuck with a single layer DVD burner? Still on 100mbit fast Ethernet? Why not move to Gigabit? There's some jaw dropping deals in June's Cheap Basket if you haven't been paying attention to price falls lately:

Dual-layer, 16X DVD-RW burner for under $50 (27£) delivered
If you're looking for a good deal on a dual layer DVD-RW burner, chances are you won't find a better deal than this, as Amazon.com will ship it for free in the continental USA. It's the Samsung TS-H552U, selling in OEM flavour (beige colour, and no bundled software) for $49.39 greenbacks, delivered to your door using slow ground shipping.

This unit received a 8/10 score in Designtechnica.com's review where it smashed the competitors like the Sony DRU-700A. It's able to write single-layer DVD plus and minus (+-R) recordable media at 16x, rewritable DVD+-R media at 4x, and dual-layer DVD+R at 5x. It features a 2MB internal buffer and "PowerBurn" to prevent buffer underruns.

Gigabit Ethernet, why not?
Ethernet cables of the CAT5e variety are now dirt cheap. In fact, if you buy cables nowadays it's very hard to find "cat5" cables that are not "5e" (capable of "gigabit over copper" speeds). The price of Gigabit adaptors and switches has gone down sharply in the last few months. In fact, I can't believe I paid near $150 usd for my first gigabit switch early last year.

PCI Ethernet cards for desktops can be had for about $25 nowadays -a Netgear, which uses the Realtek 8139 chipset-, or $35 if you prefer an Intel-chipset based one. But wait, 'Gigabit switches still cost a fortune!', I hear the chorus of parrots yelling. Have you checked the prices lately?. A quality 5-port workgroup switch from Linksys is around $67 greenbacks (after a $10 mail-in rebate) and one from SMC can now be had for as low as $49 delivered free in the U.S.

This means that for about $100 you can have both the Gigabit switch and a pair of $25 gigabit ethernet pci adaptors to move at least a pair of machines in your home or office lan to 1000 Mb/s. And if time equals money, think of all the money you'd save to read the INQ instead of watching lengthy file copy operations between your systems. µ