The Attack of the Affordable Laptops

Office Depot joins Staples this week in offering tempting temptations right at brick and mortar. Of course the "goodness" of the deals depends on your state and sales tax status with various online and brick and mortar merchants (eg NewEgg/CA, Amazon/WA, J&R/NY, etc).

14.1" drops to the half-century mark
The jewel of the price-crown is the brand new Gateway T6330u, a 14.1" widescreen notebook, for exactly $500 and surpringly for ODP, NO REBATES! It uses the dual-core T3200 processor, which you can find how it does through this cpu benchmark site. Other notables include 3gb memory, 250gb hard disk, dvd burner, wireless including N, webcam of course, and things like that. The T-6330U is a limited quantities offer, so your mileage may vary depending on how laptop-thirsty your zip code is :-)

The 14.1" laptops have been selling at a premium to the 15.4" widescreens because their smaller size gives them an advantage in terms of battery life and mobility. However, their prices have been sliding a little bit lately, and as you can see, you can now get one for half-a-thousand bucks and you don't even have to deal with rebates!

Netbooks invade the office superstores
Featured as the first portable in the Office Depot circular ad (page #4) is the Acer Aspire AOA 150-1570, going for exactly $350 and thankfully no rebates. This netbookie has an 8.9" screen, 1gb memory and 120gb hard disk. Vista-haters will be thrilled because it is running Windows XP Home. Wifi (b/g), webcam, and things like that are included. And it is powered by the ever-present Intel N270 processor.

Desktop prices tumble too
Yes sir, a dual-core (AMD Athlon X2 4400) Presario, the Compaq SR5601p, a tower desktop, is down to $230 (yes, two hundred and thirty), but after you submit and receive a total of $130 with two mail-in rebates. This, as you can expect, is a "qualities limited" promotion. It also has 1gb of memory, 250gb disk, and dvd with lightscribe. This type of prices are usually "reserved" for single-core Celeries (Celeron). Now if you are a rebate-hater, you may think about doing this, but if you are a rebate-veteran, you can't go wrong, whether you plan to use it as a separate server, cannibilize or customize it, or give/gift it to beginners or non-profits.

Two 14.1" widescreens for $800AR
If you want more features than the $500 Gateway mentioned above, or you prefer some of the "bigger names", there are two 14.1" models going for $800 each. Both include mail-in rebates of $100 to get to the $800 price however. We are talking about the Sony Vaio CS115J/R and the HP dv4-1140go. HP model names are easy to decipher, as the dv4 are for 14.x" screens, dv5 for 15.x" screens and dv7 for 17.x" screens. They do have similar features, and as you can guess from the memory, they are running 64-bit Vista. Does more bits mean exponentially more ways for freezes and crashes? :-)

Two More
Since we featured just about everything, for the completists out there, we will also mention that they are listing the bronze HP dv5-1160us for $835AR, along with the tablet HP tx2510us for $875AR, and the 15.6" widescreen Sony Vaio FW275J/B for $1150AR.

PS> "AR" of course means "after rebate"