Posted 11/10/09 at 06:13:40 PM by Pulkit Chandna

Best Buy today announced the launch of its “holiday computing selection” spanning nine different brands. Although the lineup is said to include over 30 notebooks, six netbooks, 17 desktops and four all-in-ones from some of the top brands, the retailer seems to have reserved the spotlight for a $249 Acer laptop. After all, it is Best Buy’s “lowest-advertised-price laptop” ever.

The retailer is hoping that the $249 will appeal to “value-conscious consumers.” But don’t expect the laptop to set any new performance benchmarks, for it features an insipid cocktail containing an Intel Celeron 900 CPU, 2GB memory, and a 160GB hard drive.  The $249 Acer notebook will go on sale tomorrow, along with the rest of Best Buy’s holiday computing lineup.

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Posted 08/04/09 at 04:40:39 PM by Andy Salisbury

In between the random thoughts and pictures of people’s cats on Twitter, there are some gems to be found. Among those gems are celebrity feuds, our very own Will Smith giving things away, and now cheap airfare.

JetBlue and United Airlines have begun offering “Cheeps” and “twares,” respectively, in an effort to load off empty seats for low prices. JetBlue’s first Cheep was a $9 one-way flight from JFK to Nantucket, and since then they’ve have repeated success. “By promoting the Cheeps through Twitter, we give the already spontaneous audience of Twitter users a chance to grab great last-minute fares,” stated Morgan Johnston, a JetBlue spokesman.

Apparently these tickets have become quite popular, too. According to Robin Urbanski, a United spokeswoman, “Twares are all about surprising our customers with low fares for a very, very limited time. They sell extremely fast because the prices are unbeatable.”

If you’re interested in getting in on the fun, be sure to check out JetBlue’s Cheep Twitter account here, and United’s account here.

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Posted 07/08/09 at 03:20:56 PM by Pulkit Chandna

A $1 netbook sounds like a Third World fantasy. Ironically, such a netbook has become a reality in the US. Sprint and Best Buy have combined forces to sell the Compaq Mini 110c-1040DX Netbook for 99 cents.

The only caveat being that interested persons will have to opt for a two-year service contract with Sprint Nextel, which costs $1,440 and offers 5GB of data.

The same netbook, which features a 1.60GHz Intel Atom processor, 10-inch screen and 160 HDD, is also being offered by AT&T and Verizon along with a two-year contract for $199. Its actual price is $389.

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Posted 07/01/09 at 08:30:54 AM by Pulkit Chandna

Asustek seems to have grown tired of the 7-inch and 8.9-inch Eee PCs in its inventory. Perhaps that is why it has decided to slash the prices of the said netbooks. The 7-inch Eee PCs are now available for a meager sum of $153 in Taiwan. The 8.9-inch Eee PC 900A has had its price trimmed down to $219 in China. Benson Lin, president of Asustek’s Asia Pacific division, had earlier this year told Digitimes that the company would completely phase out its 8.9-inch Eee PC netbooks in 2009.

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Posted 04/20/09 at 08:20:59 PM by Pulkit Chandna

The One Laptop per Child project has chosen Via’s low-wattage C7-M processor for a revised version of its XO laptop. The inexpensive XO laptop currently ships with AMD’s Geode LX processor, but AMD has decided to retire the processor. OLPC has made it clear that the Via-powered XO laptop - which the OLPC has dubbed “Generation 1.5” – will not be a major hardware refresh.

"The design goal is to provide an overall update of the system within the same ID and external appearance," OLPC’s VP of hardware development, John Watlington, announced on Friday. The revised version, which is due in November, will feature 1GB DDR2 SDRAM (currently 256MB) and up to 8GB flash storage (currently 1GB). OLPC will abandon the x-86 processor platform and adopt an ARM-based processor in its stead as part of its Generation 2.0 refresh.

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Posted 01/13/09 at 07:09:13 PM by Pulkit Chandna

If you are considering a netbook purchase and count the Dell Mini 9 as one of your options, you would be glad to hear that it can be yours for a paltry sum of $99. Any netbook is irresistible when it carries such a dirt cheap price tag.

However, don’t think that Dell is going to allow you to have your cake and eat it too. The hefty subsidy is only available when you opt for a two-year AT&T Laptop Connect agreement. To avail of this offer, which will last until January 31, you will have to mail in a $350 Dell rebate.

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Posted 11/14/08 at 06:07:06 PM by Andy Salisbury

Major notebook vendors like Dell and Apple are going to have a much easier time delivering those beautiful LED backlit screens in the near future, as the price of LEDs are projected to go down by 50%.

While the amount of notebooks that actually had LED backlighting in them was only 5-6% in the first three quarters of this year, that’s expected to shoot all the way up to 25% during this fourth quarter. Even still, it’s projected that up to 40% of notebooks will have LED backlighting in 2009.

At the current rate, it looks like LED backlighting will be standard sometime real soon. That’s a bright future that we look forward to.

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Posted 10/30/08 at 11:00:00 AM by Benson Hong

As some of you may recall, we featured a Budget Badass Buyer’s Guide at the beginning of the month to provide some guidance to those looking for solid performance at what we, Maximum PC, would consider to be a reasonable price. We read your responses to the build and many felt that $1500 was a bit over what the typical user would consider “budget.” So, we took it a step further and created a Budget PC below the $1500 mark. In fact, we even dropped it under $1000. At $800, we couldn’t quite figure out if it would even be possible to construct a PC that could play the latest games or even do some basic photo-manipulation in Photoshop. We stepped up to the challenge and built this Budget PC and put it to the test against our hardcore, $5000 machines to see how they match up.

Since we are still in the process of assembling the rig, benchmarks have yet to be run. For now, we give you our parts list. Check back soon for the results from our tests!

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