H_Hancock

The only thing, so far, is the $249 laptop at BB---and that's not even a BF item. The GPS units seem to be nicely discounted. They're about the only things that seem to be "doorbusters" so far, at least to me.

Actually, both BB's site and Acer's site list this laptop as NOT having an HDMI port. Link to Acer's site for specs on this laptop. On the other hand, it does have a built-in webcam, if that's important to you. It does come with Win 7 Home Premium 64-bit, a plus in my book, meaning if you ever have the itch to upgrade the memory to 4GB, the OS will use all 4GB. It also has wireless compat. of b/g/n, another plus, and LAN is GB. Overall, its price is a netbook price but is more powerful than comparable netbooks, not to mention it has an optical drive, something netbooks lack, and a much larger screen--meaning easier to read. They seem to be selling out rather quickly, at least around my area. Between last night and this morning, three BB's that had stock yesterday evening are now listed as OOS.

My bad...I'd forgotten they, too, had moved to being no rebates. And, yes, rebates can lead to great prices, but why put up with them when some stores offer just as good prices without rebates. The only thing that'll move stores away from rebates to giving the true price at the checkout is to vote with your shopping dollars. I, for one, will give my first dollars to a non-rebate store over a rebate using store...I hate to give the company a free "loan" of my money and be at the mercy of a rebate fulfillment house to give my promised money back. And I'm not speaking from sour grapes....over the many years of filing rebate forms, I've had only a very few ever get bounced back--can count them on one hand--but why put up with any inconvenience when you don't have to? If you like playing the rebate game and dance, more power to you. I'll do my primary shopping where I'm not tied to the limitations of a rebate, like "Oh, you cut the UPC off for a rebate? Well, you can't return it now. I understand it doesn't work after four days, but since the UPC's gone, you'll have to take that up with the manufacturer as we don't accept returns with UPC's missing from the box."

If you'll look closely at the ads, you'll find MOST stores, esp. the electronic centered ones, require a rebate to get the "low" price....Office Max, Office Depot, Staples, etc. Circuit City was infamous for rebates as was CompUSA when both were in business. One of the reasons Best Buy is so attractive, esp. for its Black Friday sales, is the total lack of rebates. BB quit using rebates a few years ago and has proven to be very popular. Personally, I hate rebates.....filing out the forms, not forgetting to fill them in completely, hoping it's not rejected arbitrarily, etc. Just give me the low price without the rebate dance, Easy Rebates notwithstanding. They're still rebates and your money isn't yours for months.

Without a doubt it'd work perfectly in that capacity. Not to worry at all.

That is a very good price on the Seagate drive, but after suffering through two 7200.11 failures from Seagate, I'm a tad wary of buying anything Seagate these days.

Don't you mean 16 day to BF? 15 days from today gets you to Thanksgiving Day.....

Sunshone, your post is so full of FUD, I'm surprised you could type it out without laughing and mistyping the whole time. I'll gladly be civil, but I gotta call BS when I hear/read it, and your post is just chock full of fail. First, AMD is anything but a second rate cpu manufacturer. If that sentiment was in any way true, I wonder why Cray, the ultra top end supercomputer manufacturer, uses AMD Opteron cpus exclusively in their supercomputer builds. Or how the Cray Jaguar, which uses AMD Opteron cpus, is the second fastest supercomputer out right now---installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (and how could Oak Ridge, the main facility the U.S. uses to test/simulate nuclear weapon design/function entrust their vital calculations to a second rate computer like a Cray, given your statment that AMD cpus are second rate and all....)...... Or how could IBM trust and use AMD cpus in the world's fastest supercomputer, the Roadrunner, if they were second rate? While it's true, AMD has had and is continuing to have financial difficulties, many of which were and are self-inflicted, much of AMD's financial problems can be traced back to Intel's kickback scheme with OEM computer manufacturers to prevent AMD cpus from being used. Intel has already been found liable and guilty of illegal competitive tactics by Japan, S.Korea, the EU, amongst others, and is facing an anti-trust trial here in the U.S. Of course, some of the most damning evidence is coming from Dell and Intel themselves, in which it was recently revealed that Intel paid over $6 Billion in payoffs to keep Dell from using AMD cpus. If AMD was so second rate and inferior, why did Intel feel the need to financially coerce OEM's to not use AMD cpus when it should have been obvious to the OEM's that there was no use for AMD cpus? The answer is that AMD cpus have always been and are still at least competitive with Intel cpus and in many cases faster, further along with technological advancements, and cost less. What makes AMD cool is rather good chip design and pushing the envelope on the x86 and x64 architecture in ways that you can bet that Intel would never had done on its own - or at least not at the fast pace Intel has been compelled to do a few times in its history because AMD was out in front with better chip designs. (And you do know that the ability of Intel desktop cpus to be 64-bit compatible is directly due to AMD.....Intel licenses the technology for 64-bit function in their cpus from AMD, the company that was first to market with functioning x86 cpus that could work with 64-bit software/environment.) And it's true that it has taken more than a decade for AMD to shift from reverse-engineering Intel's x86 designs to setting the pace in x64 chip designs. But at this point, Intel and AMD are drawn pretty much even as Intel has pulled an AMD and reverse engineered the Opteron processors as its Nehalem family of chips. (Yes, that is an oversimplification. But it is basically true). As for "quickly opening and closing applications" being any sort of measure of a cpu's quality or speed, that's a wholly incorrect thought process, if not a complete lack of understanding of how a computer works. In opening and closing an app, the cpu, while doing its work as quickly as possible, is very much dependent upon the quality and speed of the memory, hard drive, and underlying chipset of the motherboard it sits upon. So, just opening and closing apps is no measure of anything. A true measure is a battery of stress tests using real world applications like Photoshopping an image, or creating a high def. video, or compressing/converting a large file/image, etc. Those are the true test of a processor's power, and in those sorts of tests, the AMD desktop processors compete quite well, if not better than, processors from Intel that sell for the same price or even a little higher. Now, it's true that the very upper end of Intel's cpu range, the Core i5/i7 cpus, are much more powerful in many cases than what's currently available from AMD. But the AMD 965 cpu does do within a few percentage points in performance even compared to the vaunted Core i7 920 cpu from Intel in test after test. So, sorry, you really need to do some homework and research before you come out making outlandish statments that have no basis in fact or reality. Cheers! :)

You can forget about waiting for Fry's....their ads never show up early as they are printed as part of the newspaper, not as a separate insert. So, it's not printed up early as the inserts have to be but instead is printed the evening before the papers hit the stands/are delivered. So we don't get scans of the ads days before they hit. Wish it was different, but that's how Fry's operates....guess it's just cheaper for them that way.

Sorry, it's not OLD info but based in fact. AMD makes a total of 46 mobile cpus and the "new" 45nm Turion II/II Ultras and the Athlon II's comprise only 7 cpus out of them. Link to AMD's list of mobile cpus.....only 7 are the new 45nm parts, all the rest are the older 65nm part. And in the range of laptops most are looking for here, the doorbusters and sub-$500 lappies, you'll never find the new Turion II/II Ultra or the Athlon II's parts. Those "new" parts are much more expensive and are going into the upper end lappies. I'll grant you the IGP on the AMD motherboards are better, but that's about the only advantage the AMD systems have. Battery life is still behind what Intel has, chip for chip, and Intel's motherboards are no worse in any way than what AMD is putting in their systems. I don't get the balanced argument.....both systems are fast, unless you're speaking of the IGP, which is only advantageous when trying to play low-to-mid line games.....as we both know, "real" gamers won't buy a notebook for gaming that depends upon an IGP but will instead buy one with a discrete video card. But the fact is both the Intel and AMD integrated video processors are more than capable of web browsing, playing high def video content, streaming video and non-demanding games.

I'm sorry but I've just got to call pure BS on that comment. Completely and totally untrue and without any fact at all. Fact is: AMD typically provides the better price/performance ratio in the low-to-mid range cpus vs. Intel's offerings. It's only when you get to the high end cpus that AMD struggles to compete. As for their longevity, reliability and durability, the cpu from either maker will probably the last component in a computer that will fail or show any signs of wearing out, and are ultimately the most reliable part in a computer. There's no factual evidence that either AMD or Intel cpus are longer lasting than the other, and the typical consumer shouldn't have any qualms about purchasing a computer based on either company's cpu.

Just remember, historically, typically and consistently, on average, AMD cpu'd laptops get worse battery life than those based on Intel cpus. And part of the problem AMD has in their mobile chipset lineup comes from how AMD derives its mobile cpus. Anandtech summed it up nicely in a power consumption comparison between an Athlon 64 X2 QL-64 mobile processor based laptop vs. an Intel Core 2 Duo T6500 based laptop. The article concluded: Anandtech article.....AMD vs. Intel: Battery Life Investigated...August 2009

It certainly isn't a bad deal, but my main issue is with the cpu and specifically that it doesn't support SpeedStep, which can and does extend battery life. So this cpu will always be running at full speed and at full power draw, even at idle. But what can you expect for the price?

You'd be surprised who knows what. Don't discount the belittled hourly enployees and what they do know.

Which is why Windows 7 is so much better...XP mode. Heard of it? Gets anything that has no drivers appropriate for Win 7 to function in Win 7. Ought to try it out.

About the only trustworthy retailer that I've seen that sells refurbs with XP, outside ebay, is MicroCenter. But I have to wonder why anyone wants to put money into a system these days that has an operating system that is on its last legs, at least from the viewpoint of hardware support, updating, etc.

Not the Compaq doorbuster at OM. They list a 18.5" diagonal LCD monitor separately for $99 in the ad, which isn't a horrible price......pretty average, actually, just not horrible. The reason I say average for that monitor is that 18.5" monitors can routinely be found for like $90 AR every day.....$110 before rebate.....so the $100 price for that monitor in OM's ad isn't that great a price break. Just about routine, actually.

First, don't fret about not buying an Apple/Mac computer. What you get with it is an off-the-shelf Intel processor mated to an Nvidia motherboard, off-the-shelf memory and hard drive wrapped in a nice, white case. These days the major difference between Macs and PCs is just the operating system, despite what others claim. As for the OM Compaq computer, yes, it's a nice deal. I'd be hard pressed to match it building a comparable computer unless I really watched for sales, like the ever present cpu/mb bundles from Fry's....but you have to have a Fry's B&M store to take advantage of the prices (like the recent Intel E6300 cpu/MSI G31 motherboard bundle for $70....huge deal!) Overall, the Compaq is a good buy, but I'd wait until all the stores, such as BB, Staples, OD, etc., come out with their deals before getting your heart and wallet set on any particular model.

Started in the early '80's and haven't stopped yet.

I'm sorry, but blaming Dell for bad hard drives, which are manufactured by a completely different entity, is like blaming Honda for the Yokohama tires wearing out prematurely. From the data on laptop reliability I've seen that spans 2005-2009, all the "manufacturers" are within just a very few percentage points of failures over that time....less than 5% difference between the least trouble prone and most trouble prone......Toshiba as least and Lenovo as worst with the rest in between. Dell, HP, Compaq, Apple, Gateway, Acer are all within 2 percentage points of one another....essentially the same.

As always, BB. Just wish we'd see MicroCenter early as well as Fry's, but since Fry's is never put out early, that's just a pipe dream. But MC....I can wish. Every year I spend time at BB only to find out later that Fry's and MC had slightly better sales....but just hate to commit to a store with unknown sales.

While we're just outside Statesboro, GA, we shop Augusta, GA. But we may hit Atlanta this year for Fry's or MicroCenter's sales, which from what we've noticed over the years, are as good if not better than the Best Buy we go to in Augusta every year.

Although last BF was the first we've missed in a couple of decades, we've been regulars for about 5 years outside the Augusta, GA Best Buy. We've developed a friendship with a couple of other families over the years as a result of this. And because I got tired of being back in line and missing out on tickets for the hot items, I started going early on Thanksgiving Day, like around noon. This has gotten me on the news twice, in '06 and '07, because I was first in line those two years. You've seen those interviews....look at the crazy man who sits outside BB just to save a few bucks! LOL! :)

Typically, Best Buy first and always. The rest are Sears and Target. We will hit Wal-Mart but only later in the afternoon and at a small town one, never a larger one, having suffered through the insanity that the unruly crowds at WM bring in. The past few years, there have been tons of their doorbusters left, outside the typical cheapie laptop/computers, which is what BB is for anyway. But this year, we're considering MicroCenter and/or Fry's instead of BB. Just looking for a change, I guess. Depends on what is what in any particular ad.

And that's how the Augusta, GA, BB does it, too. Only about 40 people or thereabouts in at a time. I started going to the Augusta, GA one after two years of horror at the Savannah, GA, BB in '02 and '03. Crowd control was not there, the sit-in-the-car crowd bunched up at the door when the tickets were being brought out and the staff just about threw them up in the air rather than hand them out correctly. So, we started going to the Augusta, GA, BB. The crowd is much more civil, no pushing, crowding, nothing. Car sitters are out of luck completely, much to their chagrin. It's always funny to watch them stand off to the side, watching for some way to break into line, and with a cop watching them. Also, the Augusta BB hands out donuts and coffee at around 3AM to the line. Great staff which means the management is excellent. Horrible stores mean horrible management that cares nothing for their shoppers.