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Heh, I wish. The cheapest SATA one I've found is this one for 376 GBP (700 USD give or take)...

Are they any cheaper where you are?

TCPMP is a great player. It can also play the H.623 Mov files my Kodak DX6490 camera produces. I have tried it on 3 different Palm PDAs. My Tungsten E was the slowest due to it's 133Mhz CPU. My sons Zire 32 Played good due to its 200Mhz CPU, but the 120x120 STN screen is crap. The best is my Tapwave Zodiac with it's 200 Mhz Cpu, ATI video accel. and 320x240 TFT screen. Also the Front firing stereo speakers sound as good as a PSP. Its just bad they went out of business.
Cheap Zodiac Games

If the last few years means the last, say, 2 or 3 years, then I doubt hardly any of them have as little as 128 or even 256megs of ram. (It's hard to find a graphics card that has less than 256 megs of ram nowadays!)

but even on a 128meg machine, losing 25megs or so during a virus scan is surely insignificant - you won't notice it.

Retail for £100? Where do you shop?

£31 incl VAT http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html ?rb=9692418883&action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3 &product_uid=53163

£32 incl VAT
http://www.dabs.com/uk/channels/hardware/networkin g/productView.htm?quicklinx=36Y2

£28 incl VAT
http://www.macwarehouse.co.uk/catalogue/item/DLWL5 14?speedtrapid=mwfroogle&lead=mwfroogle

Refills of HP's new color Vivera ink cartridges will sell for $9.99, while older color ink cartridges can run $30 or more.

Canon BCI-6BK Black Ink Tank $9.99.

£1.87 (about $3.32) for colour
£1.77 (about $3.14) for black

OK, those aren't manufactured by Canon, but they work great for me. And a factor of ten in price difference compared to HP's offerings is hard to ignore.

Refills of HP's new color Vivera ink cartridges will sell for $9.99, while older color ink cartridges can run $30 or more.

Canon BCI-6BK Black Ink Tank $9.99.

£1.87 (about $3.32) for colour
£1.77 (about $3.14) for black

OK, those aren't manufactured by Canon, but they work great for me. And a factor of ten in price difference compared to HP's offerings is hard to ignore.

I use Expansys (US site)- while their prices aren't quite as keen as ebuyer (UK only I think) they have a great range, an easy-to-navigate site, loads of product compatability information, and a discussion forum for every product. I've been buying from them since they opened under the name of 21Store in 1997.

I'm in the UK and I mainly use Ebuyer, Savastore.com and Clickonit. Ebuyer generally has the cheapest prices of the three, but Savastore sometimes beats Ebuyer. Clickonit usually delivers quickest of the three and usually seems to have cheapest delivery charges too, however their hardware is usually (although not always) the most expensive of the three.

www.ebuyer.com has always served me well. I believe they have a US operation too.

So, let's see here. For $250, you get a cool-looking but big and chunky thing that's a closed platform with proprietary media formats and only a handful of games.

On the other hand, for just $20 more, you can get a Tapwave Zodiac...

Twenty dollars more than a PSP for the Zodiac1? Heck, you can get a Zodiac2 for less than a PSP, shipping included.

(Unlike the parent, I have no connection with Tapwave. Or ebuyer.)

It's One of these (oh, yeah I bought two for £25!), hooked up to two of these in an Acer Altos G310 P4-2.4 with 768MB RAM running Centos-3.

The system is running eGroupWare for around 40 users and is also a store for their mailboxes. Load is not that heavy and such a non-issue that I've not bothered to benchmark anything

There was no hassle installing the drivers from the manufacturer's Web site. The initial RAID 1 sync on the disks took 90 mins.

It's One of these (oh, yeah I bought two for £25!), hooked up to two of these in an Acer Altos G310 P4-2.4 with 768MB RAM running Centos-3.

The system is running eGroupWare for around 40 users and is also a store for their mailboxes. Load is not that heavy and such a non-issue that I've not bothered to benchmark anything

There was no hassle installing the drivers from the manufacturer's Web site. The initial RAID 1 sync on the disks took 90 mins.

You'll probably be interested in one of these then:

LG "Internet Ready" Microwave Oven

Mind the extra Slashdot spaces there kids ! or, if the link above doesn't work, go to www.ebuyer.co.uk and type "85801" in the search box to find it !

Don't know if you can get it to run Linux though ;)

I recently built a system for the kids to use. It was going to be mainly used for web browsing, email, dvd playback and word processing (homework).
I get most of my components from ebuyer and I originally wanted a fairly inexpensive Athlon XP2500+ cpu. However, as I gradually put the separate items into the cart, the damn XP2500 went out of stock, and the higher rated chips cost more than I wanted to spend.
So reluctantly, I added a 2500 sempron instead, while worrying about the reduced onboard cache (256 instead of 512k )
I built the system, and installed SUSE 9.1 via an FTP install.

Well, the damn thing was slow as f**k. The browser kept hanging (firefox) and the screen refresh was slow and the whole system felt bad. Admittedly, I am using the onboard graphics on the MSI micro atx mboard, but even so, it was sharing 64MB ram of the 512 available.
Seriously not impressed !

Anyway, as a last resort, I tried installing FC2 instead of SUSE yesterday. What a difference !

The systems feels right now, no problems with the browser and the systems responds as it should for its capabilities. I guess what I'm saying is, that unless you want a dedicated fps gaming machine then the semprons are fine. And I didn't even use the fastest available chip. I am still adding an AGP 8x graphics card though, coz the dvd playback will be so much better.

Full system specs (with ebuyer quick find codes):
MSI KM4M-V SKT A 8xAGP Onboard VGA/Sound/LAN ATA133 MATX CPU support Up to XP 3200+ (FSB333) Retail Box - £29.30 - 65354
AMD Sempron 2500 (sda2500box) Processor 256Cache 333FSB Retail box with 3 year warranty - £44.24 - 65076
Crucial 512 DDR333 PC2700 DIMM - £47.51 - 42149
Seagate Barracuda 40GB 7200rpm UDMA100 UIDE - OEM - £29.74 - 32050
Casetek CK-1007-2B Black And Silver Mini Atx Case With 250WATT PSU - £14.99 - 66024
Nec 8x DVD Dual R/RW IDE BLACK Burner - OEM - £36.95 - 58481
Mitsumi OEM Black Internal Floppy Drive 1.44mb 3.5 Inch - £3.59 - 62047
Logitech Black with Silver PS2/USB Optical Desktop Keyboard And Mouse - OEM - £19.70 - 52117
Fedora Core 2 - £free !
Sub-total £226.02
vat (17.5) £ 39.55
carriage £ 10.00
Total £275.57
Adding this later:
Gainward Fx Powerpack! Pro/660 AGPx 8 TV-DVI Fx5200 128MB Retail Box - £32.95 + vat - 59427
So not bad for just over £314 !

I am a big Costco fan but that is not a very good deal. You should be able to get XP Home for a lot less than CAD299. I recently bought an OEM copy for my son's PC for UKP58 - the price appears now to have gone up a little but it's still only half of the Costco price - equivalent of CAD 144.

Yup, you're out to lunch :P

I just bought a new gaming/development machine, and part of that was a pair of LG L1715S flat panels.

They're absolutely gorgeous, doing 1280x1024 at 75hz, with a 16ms response time. It's wonderful for playing games on as well, since it gives a really crisp, flat picture, instead of the slightly dull curved one from my old CRT.

£12.95 will get you a (Pcchips KT266A SKT A DDR266 ATA133 AGP Sound LAN USB 2.0 ATX Retail Box) ebuyer

This is not a recomendation of this particular motherboard, I simply took the item that was the top of the list. When you see something like this for this price it makes you wonder how they make their money. I know the quality is not great, it will probably die before too long, but thats not the point.

For that price how can someone make a motherboard that works even once?

£42 for a 512M CF card. £70 for a 80x version. £76 for 1G. Similar prices at all the usual places.

There's a tradeoff between price, longevity, capacity and speed; I sure hope your 256M card's nice and fast with a lot of write cycles on it.

£42 for a 512M CF card. £70 for a 80x version. £76 for 1G. Similar prices at all the usual places.

There's a tradeoff between price, longevity, capacity and speed; I sure hope your 256M card's nice and fast with a lot of write cycles on it.

£42 for a 512M CF card. £70 for a 80x version. £76 for 1G. Similar prices at all the usual places.

There's a tradeoff between price, longevity, capacity and speed; I sure hope your 256M card's nice and fast with a lot of write cycles on it.

Yes. There are certain usb memory card readers that will play mp3/wma (Here's some (UK Site)), and there are some portable usb drives that will play mp3/wma

Those in Northern Ireland will know that the biggest problem for us is pp charges. To help with this i've compiled a wee list of shops and charges usually for something small and light like an ethernet card. Sorry if any of it is wrong - if so please contact the site and let them know that they need to make it clearer.

• CCL Computers Online 10 extra. 3.95 for small order 7.50 large all + VAT
• Insight Direct 19.99
• MicroWarehouse claim they don't ship outside uk mainland
• SavaStore 15 + VAT extra
• Scan Computers UK citylink so expensive - they quote 7 + VAT for non-NI will contact you for exact pricing
• Simply Computers 12.95 + VAT
• Overclockers UK 3.48 + VAT 2nd class recorded
• ebuyer 15 surcharge on NI p&p
• Komplett.co.uk approx 10 p&p
• aria .co. uk 11.95 + VAT for under 8KG
• Novatech 15 extra p&p
• Kustom PCs
• Tekheads.co.uk RM Recorded from 2.85
• mini-itx.com 8 - 12 +VAT
• LinITX.com 2.39 recorded or 6.05 next day special (+ VAT i think)
• TheCoolingShop.com free delivery on orders over 4 but under 2KG - over 2KG = 20
• PC Nextday 17.61 inc. VAT next day
• Leapfrog Computers Ltd 6.90 + VAT
• Chillblast 1.18 inc VAT recorded 5.29 special
• Stuff-uk.net under 100g 3.75, under 500g 4.05, under 1KG 5.25, under 3KG 6.60, large over 1KG 10.50, all + VAT
• CaseTech.co.uk from 2.95 based on weight for 3-4 day courier. guess + VAT
• Crucial UK over 25 free p&p. under 25 2.95
• Over-Clock UK from 1.42 2nd class post to 4.59 citylink
• Micro Direct Ltd. 17.63 inc. VAT
• Carrera SSC 64 for complete system
• MESH Computers 20 inc. VAT
• dabs.com 5.88 inc. VAT extra

Terrible customer service. They do not allow contact by telephone and only provide an email channel for contact. Which would be fine if they ever bothered to reply.

Anyway, don't just take my word for it; here are some reviews. Pricerunner is a great little site for doing quick cheapo checks, although it doesn't seem to index ebuyer which is probably the best around for service and price.

The lesson learned from Dabs... never trust a company that sounds like a womans sanitary wear. :(

CD-Wow for your CDs.
Ebuyer for your computer kit.
Holborn Books for your computer books.
Click Ink for your generic ink cartridges.
Cahoot for your banking.
Ebay. No explanation needed!
Netto to check out what deals they've got on. Shortcut to Netto's offers.

eBuyer has a good selection of dot-matrix printers (more so in the US than the UK). They're comparatively pricey (evidently economies of scale don't favour dot-matrix printers anymore) but they're reliable and cheap to run.

I've been doing just this for some time now using this kit from EBuyer (USB 2.0 To IDE/ATAPI Cable Complete With Power Supply) using a 60Gb ExcelStore (it was cheap) harddisk with two partitions. The drive shows us as sda1 (partition 1)and sda5 (partition 2) - there is a reson for this, that escapes me at the moment.

It works well under NT 2000 and Linux Fedora (RH), however, I had problems using it under an older version of Mandrake.
The big issue is, as mentioned syncing the drives, if you find away round this I would be very interested.
My current fix is to always unmount and wait before unplugging, even then I cant always get the drive to remount without the obligatory reboot. this is obviously due to the buffering going on.

floptical (basically a floppy disk which uses an optical tracking mechanism to improve the positioning accuracy of an ordinary magnetic head, thereby allowing more tracks and greater density.) drives etc very well, they had poor read and write performance and bad reliability. Although these new drives seem to give better reliability, their speed seems to be just as poor. I'd give it a miss and buy one of these beauties.

Accutally -R drives are really not very expensive these days.

"most BIOS makers" might catch up sooner than you think. Just bought one of these (for MAME cabinet project) and USB is suppported as a boot device, although I've not tried it yet. Quite a lot of PC for £60(GBP) !

I used to have a annoying loud PC in my bedroom and it was very difficult to sleep with it on, so what I did was to place it in the basement and use it as a terminal server.
For my bedroom I built myself a not-so-dumb terminal. I used a VIA processor based motherboard and run it diskless.
All I did was fit a CD-ROM so I could boot a minial homebrew Linux based on knoppix and Morphix. Once booted up it logs in automatically and launches Rdesktop which allows me to login to my server in the basement over 802.11b.
This works great and I sleep much better now!

yeah, you just have to shop around... generic ink for epson is widely available.

5.1 sound cards are cheaper than a pack of cigs. look here

yeah but shit hardware is cheap

oh really?

Feat your eyes on this

My phone does work fine from around 100m away I don't know how or why but it does the trick maybe my dongle has got a very sensitive antenna or something who knows.
the software I use for this is Windows XP running a bluetooth stack by widcomm and their driver's Network Access profile.

for 50£ you can get a barebones system, then you can add a VIA 800MHZ processor and some RAM/Hard Drive that you steal from work! for less than £100 a MEDIA server which is much better than the xbox.

256Mb USB keychain: £129.01
200 floppies: £41.08

And because I get 200 floppies rather than just one keychain, I can stick files on a disc, give it to my mum and think no more of it. Plus I don't really trust my mum to find a USB port anyway. Maybe when she gets a computer with front USB ports - or a hub - but that ain't gonna happen for a while yet.

Sure, the USB drive has its advantages, but floppies have some of their own too.

256Mb USB keychain: £129.01
200 floppies: £41.08

And because I get 200 floppies rather than just one keychain, I can stick files on a disc, give it to my mum and think no more of it. Plus I don't really trust my mum to find a USB port anyway. Maybe when she gets a computer with front USB ports - or a hub - but that ain't gonna happen for a while yet.

Sure, the USB drive has its advantages, but floppies have some of their own too.

ebuyer has them. £80 (inc VAT) for such an ugly-assed case is a bit spendy methinks.

ebuyer in the UK have them for around £80 here

ebuyer in the UK have them for around £80 here

Amazon UK; £239.99, not including postage.

eBuyer; £257.17, inc postage.

Oh, at Scam they do OEM copies for £115.74, which is rather more sane, but still about £30 more than your quoted figure, and legally questionable.

If you're in the UK, eBuyer are very good. Europeans generally get ripped off for PC components, with prices in pounds being the numeric equivalent in dollars! eBuyer is very cheap though, and the prices approach American levels. You can get all of the components for a respectable 1Ghz box for about £250.

However, an even better resource is uk.adverts.computer. There are some real bargains on there! Everyone deals one to one, and bad traders are ferreted out and shamed in the group. It's pretty safe, and the prices are even lower. You can also get good advice about components there.. or in uk.comp.homebuilt.

Computer fairs in the UK generally aren't as good value as they used to be, unless you're looking for black goods.

Buying prebuilt computers from small builders is also very cost effective now. Sure, it's more expensive than building your own, but with the warranties, it can work out better, and you don't have to cut your hands to bits.

I use OnlyPCs who are a local firm, but will supply a brand new 1Ghz machine with CDRW, monitor, etc.. for £450 inc VAT!

I just don't see how using 2% of a $120 cpu to do the work of a $1 chip is in the consumers favor. It seems like all this does is increase manufacturer profit while marginally reducing consumer cost.

It's in the consumer's favour insofar as it enables the manufacturer to cut the final cost of their device. Leaving out that "$1 chip" can in practice equate to a £10+ difference in final cost (compare prices of hard and soft modems here): so in effect you get back something between 7% and 25% of the cost of your processor, in return for (according to your figures) a 2% performance drop.

And modern computers are sufficiently fast, and Windows performs so incredibly inconsistently, that a 2% impact is (to me) entirely unnoticeable anyway.

The easiest way is to get a basic TV+teletext card and use the teletext time signal. This certainly works in the UK -- does the US have teletext? The Linux program alevt has date setting capability -- not very complicated!! The teletext time signal is extremely accurate and can be yours for the price of an Hauppauge TV tuner (40 pounds?)
I also have a Garmin Etrex GPS linked up to my car machine: it is very easy to parse the NMEA sentences with the correct time. Make sure that the receiver can get reception: my gps is fine near the window. Take a look at Peter Bennett's site for NMEA information.