Cool Tech Reviews

A number of online (and brick and mortar) merchants are starting their Black Friday sales early this year to get a jump on the competition in these uncertain economic times and Amazon is one of them. In checking out today’s Amazon Black Friday electronics sale items I spotted the following which I thought were of interest:

• $100 (50%) off a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5 TB SATA 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Hard Drive ST31500341AS with free shipping.
• $110 (48%) off a Garmin nüvi 260W 4.3-Inch Widescreen Portable GPS Navigator with free shipping
• $156.45 (45%) off a Garmin nüvi 265W/265WT 4.3-Inch Widescreen Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator with Traffic with free shipping
• $150.00 (21%) off a HP Pavilion DM3-1030US 13.3-Inch Silver Laptop - Up to 6 Hours of Battery Life (Windows 7 Home Premium) with free shipping

New items will get the Black Friday treatment every day so you will need to check back each day.

Yes, you can still buy a new PC with Windows XP installed on it. Windows XP ceased to be available at retail on June 30, 2008 but there are a number of exceptions. The relevant exception for a consumer or a small business owner is that "OEMs can downgrade Vista Business or Vista Ultimate licenses to Windows XP Professional or Tablet PC versions for customers indefinitely," where OEMs are the large PC manufacturers.

However, there’s a difference between "can" and "will" or "will with no hassle" so Christopher Null at PC World tried to purchase a PC with XP from Dell, HP, Gateway, Toshiba, Acer, Fujitsu, Lenovo, and Asus and reports on the very mixed results. Hit the article for the full details on each, but the best bets for an machine with XP preinstalled are:

Consumer PC: Toshiba, Fujitsu, Lenovo

Business PC: HP, Fujitsu, Lenovo

If you are willing to pay extra or install XP from a CD, the choices are even more numerous. Also Asus has its line of Eee ultra low-cost PCs (ULPC) which come with XP under a different exemption in the rules.

Circuit City has a variety of bargains available in its 3 day Cyber Monday sale, but don’t expect super discount doorbuster specials. Examples:

Laptops:

• Acer Aspire AS5100-5023 15.4″ Widescreen Notebook PC with AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-56, 2GB RAM, 160GB hard drive, and Vista Home Premium reduced by $210 to $639.96.
• HP Pavilion dv6449us 15.4″ Widescreen Laptop Computer with AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-56, 2GB RAM, 160GB hard drive, and Vista Home Premium reduced by $210 to $739.99.
• Gateway M6817 15.4″ Widescreen Notebook PC with Intel Core 2 Duo T5250, 2 GB RAM, 250GB hard drive and Vista Home Premium reduced by $200 to $799.96.

Plasma TV - Hitachi 42″ Plasma HDTV Model #: HIT P42H401 reduced $300 to $1099.99.

External Hard Drives - Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 750GB External Hard Drive reduced $60 to $219.99.

There’s much more and note that they are offering %10 off on some items if you choose to pick them up at a local Circuit City store instead of having them shipped to you.