8truths

Because CNN has the financial means to survive a trade secret lawsuit.

There were some reasonable dual cores last year. And I recall a few i5s. I don't specifically recall an i7 offered by anyone. But, this year was the first year that retailers have tried to push the i7 laptops at all to anyone besides the usual Alienware and Sony customers who buy the top-flight everything.

What do folks think will be the best deal on a high-end laptop? By high-end, I mean a Core i7 or an AMD quad core. I was looking at a Staples ad this week with an i7 for $749. Seems like BF ads should at least match that, right?

price?

If you're looking for a netbook, skip Black Friday and just go ahead and purchase one of the Intel Atom netbooks available on NewEgg or TigerDirect for $200. Or if you're not married to the small form factor, get the $200 laptop from Walmart. It's not a bad machine for the price.

In general, Windows XP will outperform Windows 7. Windows 7's great advantages come in two main places: 1. Scalability. Windows 7 runs better on heavily multicore systems. However, it doesn't overtake Windows XP performance in most benchmarks until you're running an 8-core system, which to say the least you will not find in a consumer laptop anytime before 2015. 2. Direct X 11. Only important to high-end 3-D gamers. Windows XP will not run it. Overall, Windows 7 is Vista, only much improved. I only run Win7 on my media center PC. Most laptops -- especially single-core -- will see a significant improvement in general performance and battery life running XP vs 7.

True sadness washes over me. Unless Wally World suddenly decides to go all-in, the Year of the $99 Netbook is a real dud. Considering you can always find a decent $200-300 netbook on NewEgg and TigerDirect, there's no reason to get too excited. Except for the RadioShack netbook -- almost a sub-notebook, really -- there's not much to inspire at the low end. Although there are some real winners when you get into the dual-core laptops.

Slight deviation from topic: Does anyone recall if NewEgg or TigerDirect had run any deals on Blu-Ray drives last year? I have a media center PC, and I'm hoping to upgrade it.

1. A repeat of the entire post-BF Christmas season from last year. While BF largely sucked, the ongoing sales at places like Aeropostale were insane. I've never seen so many 50% off sales before Christmas. 2. A respectable, affordable netbook. 3. Could go for a well-priced laptop. That's it. Except for the netbook, I'm not married to anything except good sales. I got my DSLR and lenses last year. I've built two desktops in the last year. Just not a lot left to buy.

Here are my thoughts on the K-Mart netbook: 1. A 400 MHz chip from 2009 is far superior to a 400 MHz chip from ten years ago. Performance-wise, even this odd ball Sammy chip is going to outpace an old Pentium II. So, it should be survivable for all but the bigger Flash elements on the web. 2. It is a netbook. There's always a certain element of lowering your expectations with netbooks. 3. It is K-Mart. I'm not so much excited about this particular netbook (folks can do better, for sure). I'm excited about the price. If K-Mart, one of the also-rans for BF computers, is going $120, it's sets the bar for BB and Wally. And when BB and Wally get into a fight over BF computer prices, we the consumer tend to win big. K-Mart obviously isn't going all-in for BF electronics. They never do. So, to see K-Mart so close to a $99 netbook gives me a lot of hope.

Wow. No one has yet posted about the $120 netbook from K-Mart this year? That's a very positive sign. Considering the tendency of Walmart and Best Buy to get into a shooting war over the big electronics items, a $120 netbook at K-Mart (a lightweight in the electronics fight) all but guarantees both Wally and BB will have a $99. In fact, I wouldn't be shocked to see Wally go $89 on a doorbuster.

The cheapest desktop I ever bought on BF was a $125 eMachine in 2006. P4-era Celeron, 3.2 GHz, 512 Mb RAM, 80 Gb HD. While it still works, I no longer have it hooked up. The main fan got noisy last fall, and I replaced with a quad-core system I built myself for $500. The big ugly this year is that Intel has such a wide range of processors for the market that you need a scorecard . . . so here goes: Really low end = Celeron Dual Core, Intel Atom (mostly single core), AMD Sempron (single core) Low end = Pentium Dual Core, Athlon x2 Medium = Core 2 Duo, Phenom II x2, Phenom II x3 (a three core oddity) Higher end = Core 2 Quad, Core i5 (actually a quad core), Phenom II x4 Highest end = Core i7 (also a quad) The doorbuster super-cheapo desktop PC is always a bit antiquated. I wouldn't be shocked to see a few single-core systems still floating around for $100-150 depending on how badly the stores want to get rid of them. Anymore, you should aim for a good dual-core for general use. That's where I think this year could get interesting. The Pentium Dual Core (not to be confused with the old, crappy Pentium Ds) and Celeron Dual Core processors are selling $50-75 cheaper than any other Intels. And the AMD chips are very competitive. Pair a PDC with a 160 Gb HD, 2 Gb RAM and Windows 7, and you have a meaner computer than most BFers now own. I like the odds on a door buster $150-200 Pentium Dual Core. A lot of all day systems should be PDCs and Core 2 Duos in the $250-400 range. Expect a quad core for $400-600. And maybe Best Buy goes over the top and sells a $1000 Core i7 (the current king of all processors). And maybe if we're really, really lucky, someone will sell a sub-$200 Intel Atom desktop. Currently, a pretty nifty one can be had on NewEgg for $200 (no accessories). In truth, if you really watch the sales, especially on TigerDirect, you could probably snag a competitively priced desktop before BF.

Does Sears offer delivery on BF items? Looks like they will have a ton more W/D combos than last year. Definitely interested. Also, am I mistaken or is there a non-doorbuster combo this year for $500?

Sears - hoping they run some version of the washer / dryer combo again. Walmart - $99 netbook? Please?

If you don't get an order into NewEgg before 12 PM on Friday, it almost never gets handled and shipped before Monday.

I think this clinches it. I'm staying home and sleeping. No one seems to want my money Friday. Guess I'll just do the decent thing and give it to the phone company.

Nope. You need to clean out your browser cache. http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie6/using/howto/customizing/clearcache.mspx Or, if you use Firefox http://kb.mozillazine.org/Standard_diagnostic_(Firefox)

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/forumdisplay.php?f=9/ Don't be afraid to take these questions over to the AVS Forum. Just asking the hardcore geeks to dumb it down for you a tad. They love having new converts to their religion.

If something is different, there is a reason. I think they were astroturfing (fake mail-in campaigns made to look like grassroots). I understand your position, Brad. The truth is, you're blameless. It isn't like this is DailyKos.com, where people are expecting you torch some buildings. I just fail to understand how Walmart can possibly benefit from looking like the bad guy. You're giving them free friggin advertising and access to thousands (millions?) of people who WANT to make a big deal out of their BF kickoff to the holiday shopping season!!

They're going to have to do better than this crap. So far they've achieved the following: 1. Bullying the websites that help them. 2. Presuming they're better served if we're less informed. Wow. Make me want to rush right out to Wally. Especially after their total screw up on the HD-DVD special, where they had no HD-DVDs or any of the other crap except a palette of laptops larger than a friggin car.

Walmart employees were supportive of this crap, Brad? Hardly. My mom is a dept manager and when I told her I got the ad off of BitTorrent at the beginning of last week, she told the store manager and he asked for a copy on CD, which I gave him. None of the folks at the local Wally found any of this BS amusing.

Keep in mind at some point the gov't aims to transition radio over to all-digital, as it is doing with TV broadcasts in Feb 2009. Right now HD radio is about where HDTV was in 1998. Only a handful of the better, more reliable stations are using it in the major markets. The downside is that while the TV market is very nicely organized into market areas, and in any one region you're dealing with no more than ten broadcasters needing to change over, radio will be a nightmare of a different scale. Lots of small broadcasters and old station engineers who may not take kindly to the changeover. Since the full TV analog shutdown won't be totally finished until 2011 (when cable companies have to stop sending analog signals down their lines), it probably won't be any time before 2020 that a radio analog shutdown is implemented.

The flier is going to have to be awesome. I got my laptop two years ago. Got a desktop last year. Got my HDTV on closeout just after Christmas. All I'm looking for are spares and maybe a few can't pass up sales.

I like how our local WalMart handles the BF limited items issue. First, it is a 24 Hr Wally, so they have the advantage that they can let people come into the store. What they do is they have everyone who is there for a limited item (comps, TVs, etc) go to the optical center, where there are chairs. If there are five laptops, then they have five chairs bunched together for that. 20 32" LCDs... 20 chairs bunched for that, and so on. Then at five o'clock the associates roll out the stuff and hand it directly to the person in the chair (there is a stock room behind the optics, so they can pretty much block everyone out from trying to grab stuff off palettes). It works very tightly. Everyone just brings cards and reading material and just BS from 4 until 5 and we all ask the guys who are there for the biggest TV how long they've been there. Usually since 7pm the previous night. It's nice, it is organized and you know right away whether or not you're getting your item of choice. If there is an open chair, you're in business.

I disagree. I think Walmart just plans to suck big time. FTR, our store never even got shipped the HD-DVD players and the entire electronics dept was confused and pissed about how it all went down. They had a palette of laptops the size of a friggin short bus and nothing else.