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Staples will have the Samsung ML-2010 laser printer for $40 again on Black Friday. This is a relatively highly rated printer. The main drawback is that the toner is more expensive than other brands, and due to proprietary components on the toner cartridge, cheaper 3rd party cartridges aren't available. It is still much cheaper to run than an inkjet, of course. (inkjet ink for consumer models is a complete rip-off)

The new K-Mart that emerged from bankruptcy had higher profits - and a higher market cap - than Sears, so they were the ones buying. In fact, they had enough cash on hand to pay Sears shareholders half in cash and half in Sears Holdings stock. This K-Mart that bought Sears was not the old K-Mart that filed for bankruptcy. K-Mart Holdings was created after the bankruptcy by K-Mart's creditors instead of liquidating the company.

Nope, there are no tickets. Just a free-for-all dash.

Much thanks to ilikebike for leaking these early. (though for some reason they never got posted on the main site) Because of this, I was able to plan what I bought yesterday to compliment the motherboard I'm buying today. And I didn't even have to go out at 3am in 14 degree weather to take part in the $10 microwave/$67 dvd player/$400 laptop/$99 linux box mob.

What time did they line up at Best Buy? Last year, someone was in the Dispatch for being the first in line at around 11pm at Polaris. (and this person didn't even know what he wanted, as per the paper) With no doorbusters in the ad, they may have had an easier time.

At Fishers, IN there were 350 in line. The $400 laptops sold out quickly (all 50 sold in the first 5 minutes, one store employee in that department said), as did the $99 barebones linux boxes. (even though they have a much better computer for ~$110 if you get half the parts today, and half the parts tomorrow. $30 ultra quiet case, FAR 80GB hard drive, $10 512MB ram from tigerdirect, $70 Sempron 2800 /w mobo combo from tomorrow's ad) I didn't bother going early for the super doorbusters ($10 microwaves?? LCD DVD players cheaper than walmart? Are they trying to cause a mob?) I got there later and got the parts I needed for the mythtv box and server. I will go again tomorrow and get the motherboard/cpu combo.

Nope, the 2-page ad is it for Black Friday. The "regular ad" will start on Saturday and has been leaked in another forum post. The leak, and discussion, is here.

The $15 gift card deal is good at in the following areas, per the fine print at the bottom: Iowa stores (excluding Sioux City); Idaho stores (excluding Biose); Rapid Cidy, SD; and Huntington, WV Also in the geographic areas: Omaha, NE; Spokane, WA; Poduch, KY; Dayton and Columbus, OH This is actually a better promotion for the Average Joe than doorbusters. Joe can get a "deal" (deal to him... but not if he went to pricewatch) on the item he really wants (digicam, high end laptop). He doesn't think they'll be cheaper any time until Christmas.. so he buys now. THEN, he has Best Buy gift cards - so he has to come back before Christmas and purchase other gifts here, even if they are cheaper elsewhere. It's a win-lose scenario. Also, keep in mind that Best Buy has announced that they would like to BAN customers who buy only sale items without added RAM, protection plans, and who cause them to lose money from their store. If you are reading this post, you are one of those customers. Best Buy would like to ban you from their store. If you boycott them on Black Friday, they've won. Win-Lose scenarios are best for greedy retailers on Black Friday who don't want to give the die-hards their (expensive) candy. (my $0.02)

Papers should all be here... anyone have Fishers ads?

The walmart ad was distributed separately via ThisWeek newspapers, as the prices vary within the Columbus area. They should have arrived yesterday. If there's any confusion, call the store today.

Too bad there's no real good mobo/cpu deals... but Fishers may always be different than SoCal. I'm thinking of getting the $99 Linux box to use as a server and/or mythtv box. (btw: mythtv is like tivo, only you don't have to pay a tivo subscription.) I have an extra case, but it's a full size tower. I've heard of free or cheap after rebate computer cases in prior years.. hopefully they'll do this again.

That's certainly an odd strategy, to come out 15% below cost. Best Buy and such will have a limited supply of the sale merchandise, and the sales people will take advantage of the high pressure to push better models for "just $100 more." (People think their best deal will be early on Black Friday, and they don't have time to get to Circuit City now that they just spent 3 hours in queue lines at Best Buy) I was at Fry's a few months ago trying to get a Sempron mobo/cpu combo. However, at that time they only had a Celeron combo. (I had missed the Sempron combo by one day) I was trying to build a server, though, not a space heater, so I declined. Also, someone at the Fishers store told me that they were going to put a Fry's in Ohio. (the person said it would be Cleveland or Columbus most likely) Have you heard anything about this?

You probably want to install Fedora Core. Linspire may be sufficient if you only want to do certain things and you only want to run certain software through a "subscription" to Linspire's service... then Linspire may do. Keep in mind that Linspire logs you in as root by default, and is thus very insecure. If security doesn't matter, Linspire may do. Otherwise, choose a Linux distro. Here is my quick and dirty summary. Do a search for linux distros and you'll find hundreds more. Fedora - Formerly redhat, this is the linux distribution of choice if you need closed source kernel modules. This is considered by many to be the "standard" distribution (even though it isn't standard by any stretch of the imagination) and thus a lot of software is written precompiled for it. If compiling something sounds scary, and you don't like paying a subscription to Linspire, get this. Gentoo - if you feel dirty installing precompiled software, and you think everything should be optimized and configured exactly to your specifications, this is the distro for you. If you're a linux n00b, expect to learn a lot. quick. Mandriva - Mandrake+Conectiva=Mandriva. Use this distribution if you want th ease of use of Linspire combined with the precompiled software (to a lesser extent) of Fedora, get this distro. It is the easiest (real) distribution of Linux to use, and many people like it. Debian - if you like to call Linux "GNU/Linux" and like your software months out-of-date, this is the distro for you! Red Hat Enterprise - if you are running a mission critical server, and need to be supported by a public company, this is what you want to run.

Nope, but there's a gaim.

You can't low level format a modern hard disk. It simply can't be done. (Maxor, I believe, offers a utility that calls itself a "low level format" that in reality just zeros the disk and clears some internal structures. There is no reason to do this other than debugging) Simply boot into Linspire, get to a console, and type dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1024 count=1 **WARNING** This will zero out the partition table and the start of the boot sector of the hard drive. **WARNING** Then proceed to install xp home as normal. Before doing so, you may want to try Linux first. You may like it... and it performs much better than windows xp in many tasks.