Hello, Universe » Deals

Choosing a netbook…

Me — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:06:20 +0000

There are so many netbooks available these days. It’s nice having alternatives to the EEE PC, but which one will give me the best bang for my buck? Asus EEE PC, HP Mini Note, Acer Aspire One, MSI Wind, Sylvania G, Lenovo S10, Everex Cloudbook, Dell Inspiron 910 (or whatever they’re calling it now)? Sooooo many choices!

I’ve kind of been waiting for Dell to release theirs to see what their price point will be, but with all of these other choices, I’m getting a little tired of waiting.

These are what I really want in a netbook – besides the obvious qualities of it being lightweight & portable:

Good battery life – if I’m gonna be taking it out and about, I really want a battery that lasts for a long time… meaning more than 3 hours… maybe I should wait until most of these start offering six cell batteries instead of 3 cell ones.

Decent screen size & resolution – this kind of rules out any of the old Asus 7″ EEEs. Those are way too small and I’d want at least 1024×600 resolution for comfortable viewing

Easily upgradeable RAM – I don’t want the RAM to be soldered into the board making it hard to upgrade in case I need to.

Built in card reader – at least an SD card slot would be great!

Built in bluetooth – not really a must, but it’d be nice to have.

Price – I’d probably spend no more than $450 for one.

I’m kind of leaning towards the Acer Aspire One right now, but like I said I’m still waiting on Dell to see what they’ll offer and what their price will be, but I’m kind of sick of Dells. Or maybe I’ll wait and see what’ll be offered on Black Friday.

Time for another ReplayTV upgrade

Me — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 01:21:32 +0000

I’m still using my ReplayTV, or I would be if it was working properly. It’s not HD capable or anything, it’s just a regular old 5040 model, but I love this thing. Like the original 40 GB hard drive that came with it, the current one I have now (an 80 GB drive) has bitten the dust, at least for use in a ReplayTV – it might still be useable for storage or something, but I don’t think I’ll be storing anything important on it.

Time to do an upgrade again, but I forgot the procedure on how to do it since it’s been so long since the last upgrade, so I’ll need to look up that info. It also might be a good idea to clean up any dust that might have built up inside while I have it opened up.

I found a sweet deal on a hard drive yesterday. Target had a Western Digital Caviar EIDE 250 GB hard drive for 75% off, so it was marked down from $99.99 to $24.98. I was so stoked since I didn’t want to spend more than 50 bucks on a new hard drive, so that was an excellent find! After this upgrade, my ReplayTV will be able to record up to 250 hours of TV on normal quality. I can save a lot more episodes of shows that way.

This’ll be fun for me though. I haven’t taken anything apart in a while, so it’s nice to finally have another opportunity to do so.

It’s that time again… Amazon Customers Vote!

Me — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 01:31:10 +0000

It’s that time of year again where Amazon lets customers vote in 6 different rounds for the product that they want to see at a huge discount. If the product that people vote for doesn’t get picked, then it’ll be offered at a “runner up” price.

They started it last year and at first it was a free for all, first come, first served kind of deal. Anybody could get in on the deal, even if it wasn’t the thing that they voted for. And that really killed their servers when everyone was trying to score a $99 Xbox 360. Then they switched it up to be slightly like this year’s promo where you were only eligible to buy whatever you voted for… still first come, first served. That still crashed their servers. So in the final rounds of the promo, they changed it to exactly how they’re doing it this year – you’re only eligible to buy whatever you voted for AND you have to be randomly selected by Amazon to get in at the special price.

After all was said and done, I didn’t end up getting in on anything except for their “thank you” deal which was a Swiss Army Knife at a discount price. I was lucky to get in on that.

This year, they’ve got a lot of great choices as far as the voting goes. I was totally torn between the PS3 and 360 in the first round, but seeing as how the Wii is in the lead and the runner up prices on the PS3 and 360 aren’t as good as the “winning” price for them, I’ll probably end up voting for the Wii even though I’ve already got ~~one~~ two.

I’m really not expecting to be picked for anything, but it’s always worth a try just to see if I’m actually lucky enough to get in on some amazing deals.

Check it out, if you haven’t already. Just visit Amazon.com’s home page and there should be a scrolling Flash animation in the top right corner about the Vote promo.

All you have to do is ask

Me — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 20:04:27 +0000

It’s no secret that I buy and sell stuff on eBay… who doesn’t at least buy stuff from eBay?

There’s a product that I’ve kind of been wanting, but I don’t want to pay full price plus tax for it since I know it’s not worth the full price.

I found it for $19.99 shipped on eBay. Regular price is $29.99-$34.99 plus tax, depending on where you buy it, and possibly plus shipping too. So $19.99 is a good enough deal for me, especially since buying a replacement part of that product from Nintendo’s online store will cost about the same… with eBay, I’ll be getting the whole product. But sometimes I worry about buying stuff on eBay, like how could a seller offer this product that normally sells for $29.99+ for just $14.00 plus $5.99 shipping? Sure, it’s listed as used in “like new” condition, but is that really what I’ll be getting? Even though the seller has really good feedback, I still wonder about these things.

So, what do I do? Well, I’ve done this before and people have always been really helpful. You can either look through the seller’s feedback and see if anyone’s bought that same product before (this works better for bulk listings since you’d know that they’ve sold more than one already) and check what kind of feedback people left. That can be helpful, but sometimes people only leave one or two words of feedback like, “Great” or “Thanks” which isn’t useful at all if you’re trying to find out about the item itself.

If I don’t find any helpful feedback, I’ll go ahead and contact the eBay members who have bought the same item from previous auctions. This is perfectly fine and doesn’t go against eBay policies because I’m not trying to sell them anything, just asking them questions. Just tell them you saw that they won ____ product from ____ seller and that you’re thinking of buying the same thing and were curious about the quality of the product (if it was as described) and if you have any specific questions about the item (like if there are multiple versions of a product, which version was it?).

The worst that can happen is people will just ignore you and usually if I ever get a reply, people are extremely helpful. I sent the same eBay message to three people last night asking about the product, and so far I’ve gotten two great responses that have convinced me to buy from the seller. I was already convinced after the first reply, but it’s nice to get a second opinion basically agreeing with the first person’s opinion.

It’s great how nice other people are on the Internet. If you’ve got a question about something, it never hurts to ask.

If it saves me money, I’ll take a refurbished product over a new one any day!

Me — Wed, 27 Apr 2005 08:20:30 +0000

When I’m browsing on a deals site and someone posts this great deal on a product, then the next post is someone saying just one word “refurbished” – uhh, okay, and your point is? It seems like people view refurbs, reconditioned, factory restored, or something along those lines as a bad thing. Well, I’ve had pretty good experiences with refurbished products.

The first refurbished thing I bought was a Sony Mavica MVC-FD95. That was my first digital camera and I got a pretty sweet deal on it (sold it for 50% more than what I bought it for after about three or so years of using it). It worked just like a brand new camera. It was awesome… I really miss the 10x optical zoom on it. My digital camera now (Canon Powershot S30) doesn’t even come close to the FD95′s zoom.

My next experience with a factory restored product was with my ReplayTV 5040 that I got a couple years ago. This was another awesome deal… a 5040 with lifetime activation (NO MONTHLY FEES!) for pretty much the cost of activation alone. This was when they were clearing out the 5000 series that had commercial advance and show sharing, so I wanted to make sure I got one. Anyway, when I got it, this thing looked brand spankin’ new. No cosmetic defects or anything and it works just like new. And it’s been working well ever since I got it. I upgraded the hard drive in it to 80 gigs so I could record more stuff.

My third refurbished product is something I’m using at this very moment. My Dell Inspiron 600M. I got this from the Dell Outlet in January. Pretty much the stuff they sell in the outlet are systems that were returned because people changed their minds about them. So these systems were probably never even powered on at all. Dell can’t really sell them as new anymore since they’re not new, so they sell them in the outlet as “refurbished” – well, I’m glad for that because I got a great computer for a pretty good price.

People who don’t appreciate deals on refurbished products don’t know what they’re missing out on. These products are like new. Possibly even better than new because when they’re returned, they’re inspected and made sure that they’re working smoothly before they’re resold, so you’ll probably never get a DOA refurbed product. And most of the time, they carry the same warranty as if you bought a brand new product, so you still have that assurance if you do have problems with it. If you haven’t given refurbs a try, you might want to consider them for your next purchase… except for certain perishable goods, health and beauty products, and others of that sort. I mean more like electronics and stuff like that.

Uh-oh… I’m on a spending spree again

Me — Wed, 14 Jul 2004 07:45:18 +0000

Every once in a while, after managing to save some cash, I just end up spending it all without realizing it. Well, lately, with all these deals on video games ($9.99 for 1080 Avalanche, $4.99 clearance sale at Circuit City), and of course Target clearance deals and eBay bidding, I ended up spending a lot.

So much for saving money for Comic-Con this month.

Anyway, I really like the things I got today. The first is a new Microsoft Wireless Base Station/Router (MN-700). With this, I was able to upgrade my network from 802.11b to 802.11g… finally! Well, not completely upgrade. I still need to get a PC card for my laptop, then I’ll be all set, but my current PC card will do for now.

Even though it doesn’t seem to have as strong a signal strength (in my house, anyway) compared to my old Netgear MR-314, my Xbox Wireless Adapter works a lot faster now, since that was 802.11g to begin with. There’s no more lag when I’m streaming stuff off my PC to watch with Xbox Media Center. Now I don’t have to pause the video to wait for the Xbox to download more from the PC. It’s better now… I’m happy with my purchase… and it was a pretty good price too. Since MS isn’t going to be making any more wireless products and they discontinued their current line of wireless networking stuff, this was on clearance so I snatched one up.

I posted about this earlier… and it came today! Woohoo! I mean the Samsung drive for my Xbox, not the Naruto sleeping cap. :( Anyway, I got this and installed it. It took me a lot longer than it should have, but I wanted to make sure I did everything right. Now my Xbox can read all of my burned CD-R’s! It also seems to read my Xbox games slightly faster too. I’ll put up some of the pictures I took when I feel like uploading them.

Some new categories… and stuff!

Me — Tue, 06 Jul 2004 22:01:22 +0000

I added some new categories… well, sort of just edited ones without any posts, but I did add one. I made a Naruto category for any post where I even mention Naruto.

I won’t say which ones I got rid of since nobody probably ever noticed what was there in the first place. But what’s there now? Deals, Internet, and Pet Peeves.

I’ll start off with a pet peeve or two or more…

Sure, I love to get a good deal. Who doesn’t? But what I hate is when greedy bastards buy up everything in stock just to resell on eBay or trade for other things on forums. :notrust: It sucks, especially when it’s a game deal. I only ever participate in deals where I’m actually gonna get use out of something. If you’re not gonna use something, don’t buy it! Or at least save some for the rest of us who actually want or need the products. I love places like CAG, VGT, FW for their information, but I hate how popular they’ve all become that once something gets posted, the deal will be over unless you act fast.

In my opinion, bargainshare.com is still the best place for deals. Nice people, great community, and people who understand not to post things to FW and other places because it’ll kill a deal.

Next pet peeve… forwarded e-mails. I hate them. They’re not very original and pretty much a waste of my time. Since I use Outlook Express to check my mail most of the time, any time anybody forwards something, it gets sent as an attachment instead of inline text with a bunch of >>>>… so if I want to actually read these things, I’d have to open up attachment after attachment just to get to the actual message. So do me a favor and don’t forward me any of this crap.

Another one – eBayers or anybody I sell/buy/trade with who never leave feedback. If you’re a seller and I pay you fast, I expect feedback for it. From now on, if you’re a seller and I don’t get feedback from you, you’re not getting one from me… unless I have something negative to say. I’ve never ever gotten any feedback at all for all the times I’ve ever sold anything and it sucks because to other people, it looks like I’ve never sold anything.

Well, that’s all for now.