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See a relevant discussion on Fatwallet's Finance Forum. You have the right idea--invest all the money you can. There are plenty of others on the board in similar situations. You'll learn a lot there.

• 1) Subscribe to Kiplinger magazine and read it every month
• 2) When picking investments you must balance time,sinze of the investment, rate of return and risk. If you have the choice between paying off a 10% credit card or a 6% CD the choice is obvious. If the choice is between a 4% student loan and a 10% stock investment the choice should also be obvious. Ideally you should be saving at least 1/3 of your income. Take that money an invest it to make some sort of decent return. In school this will be painfull but you will thank yourself later. Spending money on your education is an investment.
• 3) Debt is not your enemy. Learn to manage your debt. Borrowing money to earn a higher rate of return elsewhere is often the smart way to go. If you never take a loan or use a credit card you will find yourself in a tough position if you eventually want to borrow money. You have to have a credit history to have good credit.
• 4) Tax implications can influence you choice of investment. For instance, that 7% homeloan is not as bad as you think becasue you can deduct the massive amounts of interest you pay in the first half of the loan from your taxes. Maybe not too much of an issue when you are only making 20K/year going to school, but it quickly becoems one one you graduate and get that $40K job.
• 5) Ask and you shall receive. Students and young folks will spend endless hours filling out forms for $2K student loans or grants but don't bother to spending a few minutes to ask family members. The same goes for anything else you need. If you need help don't be afraid to ask for it.

I'd strongly suggest taking a glace at this thread on fatwallet.
Avoid the hot deal's forum - you'll be broke and in debt - some of the deals are really tempting ;)

Some of the better banks have options that pay 4-6%, ing direct is probably the most popular one, but there are others.
If you can (new college student, so probably not), get a credit card with 0% interest on balance transfers for 1 year, take out a bundle and then toss that in as well. Not fucking up your credit is probably the most important.

I maintain a FAQ on a financial forum about open source financial applications. It is mostly geared towards personal users, but there are links and information to business-focused applications as well. There are non-profits & small businesses who do use F/OSS!

There isn't an open source QuickBooks clone. But many F/OSS applications do have features which QuickBooks lack (and vice versa, of course). Rather than looking for a "clone," one should clearly define their requirements & look for the app or apps that may fit those needs. If some are "close," money and/or labor can be spent refining the F/OSS applications. If all are far from your requirements (such as a requirement like "I need software which does exactly what QuickBooks does & has the exact same interface"), then suck it up & purchase QuickBooks. It doesn't cost an arm and a leg! If you find your organization doing this a lot, then re-evaluate your software selection practices--alternative software usually doesn't mean cloned software (whether F/OSS or proprietary) & you will never be able to benefit from very good software which is monetarily cheaper, uses open formats, and is functional.

http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/messageview.php?st art=0&catid=52&threadid=478098 Citibank is now offering 5%. FDIC insured and will not lose value like a money market fund.

http://www.fatwallet.com/t/74/622042

It was only that price for 2 days.

But I expect it'll hit that price full-time in a month or so. We'll see.

It would be nice for someone to do a mini-review or comparison of the different FOSS or FOSS-friendly financial packages, because frankly, I'm ready to leave Intuit.

This fatwallet thread "Living frugally without hardship" is a great start.
It is pretty long, but full of valuable information.

That costs me $500. A GeForce 6800 GT costs the same amount.

No it doesn't. In fact, it never cost $500 (we're talking US$, right?) -- it was released at $350 retail.

Please start over with your point using reality as a basis. Thanks.

And don't forget to hit Toys R Us tomorrow for some cheap games.

I maintain a FAQ on F/OSS finance applications over on FatWallet.

You can run most popular windows apps under Wine, but I'd suggest using the fine native or online software.

I love GnuCash--especially for stock management (you can make a cron script to download quotes as periodically as you want to track, which Quicken & MS Money both lack). It takes some work to do auto-downloads of US financial institutions, but it is possible. I'd actually advise against it--if you record transactions as you make them (you can do this when watching TV), you can spot bank errors or improper charges easily & then reconcile when you reconcile with your monthly statement. Both MS Money and Quicken encourage this too, but few people take advantage of it.

Taxes are trickier. There is F/OSS tax software, but it just makes the process of manually doing your taxes a little easier. I'd suggest cruising over to IRS's taxfreedom site--there are scores of online tax preparation utilities which have interfaces similar to TurboTax. The IRS can direct most people to one that won't cost them anything. E-filing is fast, easy & gets your refund quicker. You can actually track your accounts online with an aggregator such as yodlee, but I find Gnucash or others to be so handy when making customized reports.

I maintain a FAQ on Fatwallet of the free/open source finance applications. Particularly useful are the links there.

I'm a GnuCash zealot. I love that I can setup a cron script to download data on market close. I keep a couple dozen accounts in it with no worries. I would never go back to Quicken or Money.

If you don't dig the F/OSS thing, there are commercial apps for Linux or you can get both Quicken & Money to work OK in Crossover Office. Anotheer alternative is to do all of this online with a service like yodlee.

And you're a fucking idiot.
There have been several times in the last couple of months where you could buy modern laptops (new, from retail stores) for as cheap as $300. Even so, the price on laptops has dropped quite a bit and you really don't even have to look around very long to find a laptop for $600 and change.
In fact, here is one for $674.
It took me all of 15 fucking seconds to find it (literally). Had I wanted to find something better, I easily could of have. Sadly, Dell got anally raped last quarter, so it will be a bit harder to find something for 5 and change, but during the past couple of months, I don't believe that there was one day without a $500-$600 dell laptop deal.
This totally ignores government auctions and the fact that some people need to sell their shit "now" to pay for rent or so that Guido won't break his legs, etc.
So, really, $300 isn't completely off the wall when it comes to someone selling a used laptop and is a perfectly reasonable price unless you're a mouthbreathing redneck who goes to "Best Buy" to decide what laptop prices are.
Feel free to yell "fence, fence!" and apply that label to everyone who sells "hi tech" stuff online, but perhaps you should Try Thinking (TM).

I find Fatwallet.com has a great forum for discussion about current deals it finds.

http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/"

Now, the problem is that its scope is limited. You usually can only find something that someone has posted about and can get discussion on.

Another issue is that the reviewers are only human, and can sometimes make mistakes, have biases, and generally be fanboys/girls about certain manufacturers..

But I guess if you go there, post a link to your item of interest, with a quote on price, you could find one or two people who might have had experience with what you're buying.

I perused it for my Fujiplus 19in LCD and the comments were mostly supportive. I was VERY hesitant to buy a 300 dollar LCD monitor on the web without seeing if it was working or in good condition.

Heck, I had to talk myself into thinking that 16ms vs 12ms was a huge difference. You know? It probably was.

Well, it being my first LCD, I had to know what could be wrong with it when I got it. People complained about colors not being right. I found that out, as well as how to fix it, before the thing even shipped.

  I just have to sit in a relaxed position to get the best contrast from the thing (its rather off if you move too much vertically, but quite good horizontally, not sure if that explains it well)

  Another worry, was dead pixels.. I got a single pixel, near the bottom corner, that only pops up as noticable once in a blue moon. Nothing I would complain about, though.

include:

http://www.bargainshare.com/
http://forums.anandtech.com/categories.cfm?catid=4 0
http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/categories.cfm?cat id=18
http://www.slickdeals.net/

besides tech deals, one thing i would definitely recommend tech people check out are the finance and grocery forums at these sites (if they have it). you can save so much more money than from purchasing tech equipment.

http://www.fatwallet.com/
Every once and a while I find some really good deals through in the Hot Deals forum. Although you need to look out for the occasional outlandish price matching scheme to get the deal.

http://www.fatwallet.com/
Every once and a while I find some really good deals through in the Hot Deals forum. Although you need to look out for the occasional outlandish price matching scheme to get the deal.

Hardcore shoppers will take advantage of the various coupon/deal sites, and forums, such as:
100 Big Coupons
SlickDeals
Headlinedeals
Tech Bargains
Hot Deals
Of Course Fat Wallet Hot-Deals Forum can't be forgotten

Just keep in mind that these sites do have affiliate agreements with companies, and so are making a buck off the purchases you click-through from their sites. Some of their recommendations may be skewed based on their affiliate agreements.

These are the sites where you'll find out about last minute clearances, specials, % off coupons, and pricing errors. Often you're being the 'evil consumer', but you're getting a heck of a deal.

I'm a solo recording artist, and after losing an entire album in a hard disk crash a few years ago, I decided to do something about it. As hard drive prices started going down, I decided to start buying 200GB plus drives to expand my storage capabilities.

Right now I have a 200gb HDD and a 250gb HDD for backup purposes - both are in USB external enclosures, and are IDE drives.

I wait until prices hit around 35 cents or less per gig, and buy then. Keep an eye out on sites such as Fatwallet and Deal News for deals. My favorite time to pick up a new HDD is black friday - day after thanksgiving. Most stores have really great deals on IDE hard disks. I pick up my external enclosures @ Newegg.

Slickdeals is awesome, but Fatwallet is even better!

Like...
Fatwallet
Slickdeals
Spoofee
Ableshopper
etc. etc.

I cleared nearly $2500 of rebates last year, and only have one or two outstanding that have yet to be cleared up (probably with a quick letter to the local AG). The key is to be creative, tenacious, and to track everything. A program like Rebate! Rebate! helps a lot, but you can accomplish the same things with a PIM or spreadsheet. It also tells me that I only spent around $200 more than I received in rebates. Finally, FatWallet rules.

First of all, I have a problem with banning anything - I think consumers should be able to evaluate if they like rebates or not, and purchase accordingly. I happen to like rebates.

If you are willing to take the time to fill them out and follow up when necessary, rebates can be good. I've gotten over $8,000 in MIR since I started keeping track (the excel spreadsheet is here.

Rebates can be good in a couple ways. First of all, if you stack a rebate with a coupon with a minimum spending limit - ie a $20 off $100 coupon - you get to use the coupon and send for the rebate. Secondly, stores also offer FAR (free after rebate) stuff, and they aren't just going to hand you free stuff - but they will after rebates. Thirdly, sometimes through loopholes you can make out - I recently got paid $45 by Microsoft for buying OneNote - it was $55 from Amazon with a $100 rebate from Microsoft.

Also, if you are having trouble with a rebate, the rebate tracking forum on Fatwallet is a great resource - you can learn which companies are good and bad about paying in a timely manner, and there is a sticky thread with contact info for most major rebate processors.

The boss usually likes to buy through Dell, as it is a name he trusts. I haven't minded, as fatwallet has often pointed me to fantastic deals & I could look good by stretching the buck as far as it went.

We recently needed to get non-SMP machines which could address massive amounts of memory. Dell's anti-AMD stance made this exceedingly difficult. Instead, we ordered through Monarch. They are fantastic! The prices are fair--not so cheap as build-your-own & not as cheap as the outrageous Dell deals that sometimes pop up, but very fair. They are also Linux-friendly & have excellent support. The boss was impressed with how far the buck stretched for top-of-the-line workstations (though Dell would be better for entry-level) & we've placed more orders through them.

Re-reading my own glowing review makes it seem a bit over the top, but I really have no other connection to Monarch aside from being an exceedingly happy customer. They're worth a try if you want AMD machines.

There's a post on fat wallet that goes into this topic a bit. Basically it's a waste if you're only going to have one child because the defect will be present in the cord blood as well. Cord blood storage is discussed as well as pricing and previous user's experiences with them. The American Red Cross donation program is also mentioned as well. Interesting read for those of you who are passing your slashdot genes along ;)
-B

This news is unsurprising. On a number of occasions, they've had some promotion that they've emailed to some select members. The terms and conditions of the promotion don't state that it is only good for these members. These deals then find their way onto deal sites & people who didn't get the original email were denied the promotion. They've done this a few times & received numerous complaints.

If you have the time, monitor a "Hot Deal" forum such as Anadtech or fatwallet and jump on Dell's occasional sales on low end servers and the like.

I got a my latest hot rod gaming rig for a song!

And unlike some other posters my support (and sales) experience has been terrific.

Cheers

Bill

From Sunday Best Buy will be selling this a Toshiba Satellite M35X-S111 for $500. There is a rebate involved though, unfortunately. Specs:

15" XGA TFT active-matrix display with 1024 x 768 resolution

40.0GB EIDE hard drive (4200 rpm)

Intel® Extreme Graphics with 16-64MB DVMA shared video memory; S-video TV-out

i.LINK (IEEE 1394) port and 3 high-speed USB 2.0 ports for fast digital video, audio and data transfer

Integrated 10/100Base-TX Ethernet LAN with RJ-45 connector; V.92 high-speed modem

Weighs 6.6 lbs. and measures 1.5" thin for portable power; lithium-ion battery and AC adapter

Windows XP Home Edition Service Pack 2 (SP2) operating system preinstalled; software package included with RecordNow!, InterVideo WinDVD 5 with SRS TruSurround XT technology

However, a lot of the 1280x1024 LCD panels are being made with the correct (5:4) physical aspect ratio these days, even the `cheap' ones ($600 range at Best Buy)

Even the $299 one(s). I bought a 19" LCD from Walmart.com with native 1280x1024 and it is 5:4 unless my math is wrong (screen measures in at approx 14.875" x 11.875"). I know, no way in hell is a $299 LCD going to acceptable to most people here but I have absolutely no issues what so ever with the screen quality and there were no dead pixels. I was pricing 19" CRT's and they are very close in price to this LCD so I got the LCD instead. I have no regets. It even has DVI.

Link to the LCD monitor
Link to a FatWallet.com discussion of the monitor

When I got my 17" powerbook, I priced out a comparable dell - with you added all the things that apple included (wifi g, dvd burner, bluetooth), the apple was cheaper.

The PowerBook may have been cheaper than a Dell sold at retail price, but when I buy Dell laptops, I pay 30-40% less than retail using coupons and discounts that I find at FatWallet. The best non-academic deal I've ever seen for a PowerBook is a $150 rebate, which is insufficient.

FatWallet Forums: Search

Does it have a DVD burner?

Although I do have a couple of TB of storage on the LAN, I do of course run out of space and some burning is required. Personally, I convert most everything to DIVX and burn to CD - stil working through an odd thousand or so free-after-rebate blanks. But I hear you can get DVD burners for basically free these days.

a few hundred or thousand bucks on eye surgery... or you could get a pair of eyeglasses online for less than $20.

Hey, the ATI 9800, which was benchmarked in the article, is only $147 if you're in So. Cal. and $179.99 anywhere else (BestBuy, even.) GeForceFX5950 isn't much more, if not less (online.)

Yes, the ATI high end and amazingly-high-performance nVidia6800 Ultra are $500ish, but the nVidia6800GT trounced the $500 ATI card and it's $100 less. That's three choices $400 and under, two under $200!

Hey, the ATI 9800, which was benchmarked in the article, is only $147 if you're in So. Cal. and $179.99 anywhere else (BestBuy, even.) GeForceFX5950 isn't much more, if not less (online.)

Yes, the ATI high end and amazingly-high-performance nVidia6800 Ultra are $500ish, but the nVidia6800GT trounced the $500 ATI card and it's $100 less. That's three choices $400 and under, two under $200!

Side 1 - people suck - have you ever read any of these "deal forums" (Fat Wallet and AT Hot Deals are two I read from time to time. Jesus fucking christ these people would walk a mile through the desert barefoot while eating salted peanuts for a fucking $10 rebate. Sometimes the "sequence of events" required to get these deals is more fucking work than just well, working and BUYING it for regular price, pricematch here, rebate there, obscure coupon code over there, print someone's reciept from some other store in some other state, and you might get a $79 item for $64 or something equally lame. I get a chuckle at the enormous lengths people will go to to save a couple bucks.

Side 2 - Best Buy sucks - reading this site is like a traffic accident complete with ripped off limbs, you can't stop looking but you know you should. The damn near criminal "support policies" they push and push and push on you, and the "piggyback" magazine subscriptions make me want to do things that would get me on the news. I'm currently getting bills from Entertainment Weekly because when checking out at BB a few months ago I let them "send me 4 free issues" just to get them to shut the FUCK up. Now they want me to pay for the stupid magazine like I give two drops of spit about EW (ew is right).

I don't know who to root for in this fight... Best Buy or the "demon customers" socking it to them. Goddamn I hate rebates, I go out of my way to avoid deals involving rebates because they just PISS ME OFF so bad.

Really I'm not ranting...

Actually, if you're willing to do some rebates, you can generally get wireless 802.11b routers for about $20.
Every one of these I've seen also has a 4-port 10/100 switch built in.

Just remember to set up wireless security or, if you have no wireless devices, turn the wireless connections off entirely.

--The Rizz

"Some men are alive simply because it is against the law to kill them." --Ed Howe

I just bought a Philips DVP642 from CompUSA for $69. For the price it can't be beat. Plays Divx 3,4 and 5, Xvid and a bunch of other formats. I haven't had any problems playing anything yet.

Check out this extensive thread at fatwallet:

http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/messageview.php?ca tid=18&threadid=306890

MovieLink currently runs a promotion where any movie costs 99 cents.

They have all the MPAA stuff, like Matrices and stuff available on DVD right now.

Requires Windows DRM client, and once you start watching, you have to finish within 24 hours.

Yes, they could. It's better than forever, and as the creator of a lot of copyrighted material that is occasionally used without my permission, I can attest that it's useful. So far, no one has been willing to contest my takedown notices.

Irrelevant. In fact, I agree, the vast majority of takedown notices are probably quite legit. My prior point about how you treat the edge cases stands; the measure of freedom isn't the common case, it's the unusual case. The 10 day window is completely irrelevant in your case, since as you say, no one has contested any of your takedowns. So having sites immediately restored on counter-claim wouldn't hurt you in the slightest.

The penalty for filing false takedown notices ... for starters, ISPs will ignore your requests if you are a luser with a penchant for crying wolf...

1. Only after successfully taking down pages for a while, and 2. it's not like new identities are hard to make on the internet. True, it would be difficult to keep something off of the internet permentantly. But taking something off the internet for ten days would be relatively easy. In some cases ten days is plenty of time to effectively destroy the value of someone's free speech rights. Easiest example I can pull up? Wal-Mart (and others) silencing Fat Wallet from discussing discounts. The ten day window was plenty to destroy discussion prior to the actual sales day. After the sale day had passed Wal-Mart just said, "Oops, I guess we were wrong" and walked away.

I'm not fond of the takedown policy, but if we must have it, then there are a few minor changes that would dramatically improve it. First, upon receiving a takedown request an ISP should be required to promptly take reasonable measures to contact the person who is paying for the site (odd how the ISP has a responsibility to a third party, but none to me, the person paying them). Second, the ISP should be required to repost the content after I file a counter-claim, and must do so as promptly as the original takedown. The ten day window is too easily abused and serves no public good.

I doubt its very widespread...

If silencing of perfectly legal speech was widespread it wouldn't be a problem; everyone would know, people would get angry, things would be changed or an illegal communications channel would pop up to replace it.

The problem is that it's relatively infrequent. It doesn't seem like a serious problem, so the small number of people getting screwed tend to be ignored.

ISPs are a dime a dozen. You can find them to pump your spam, serve your porn, email, whatever. If you don't agree to the terms of use for any reason, simply go to another one.

Great, if I want free speech online I get to share an ISP with porn sites and spammers. Which, of course, will get me blacklisted in other ways.

The reality is that DMCA is quite clear; when given a properly formed DMCA takedown request the content must be removed. Failure to do so exposes the ISP to liability. End result: very, very few ISPs will stand up for you. Worse, almost no ISP will tell you up front about their policy. When I arranged my current provider they seemed positively confused when I asked about their DMCA takedown policy. Given that they run tens of thousands of web sites I know they see DMCA takedowns. Because of the relatively infrequency of DMCA takedowns and the even smaller number of takedowns that are wrong there aren't enough data points to form a review web site to find out which ISPs are badly behaved.

I would imagine that most every ISP has a zero tolerance policy (aside from the sleezy ones that will host anything for a price) regarding copyrights, and don't care to spend any time figuring it out.

My point exactly. I get sleazy, blacklisted sites, or I get a near-zero tolerance policy. Even a day of having a page taken down can be a serious problem. The DMCA mandated 10 days is downright crippling. Just ask Fat Wallet, which was issued DMCA takedown requests that effectively destroyed their ability to compare post-Thanksgiving specials. By the time the content was back up, the day was past. Cost to Wal-mart? One nasty-gram from a lawyer.

My favorite sites and forums:
anandtech.com
couponcraze.com
dvdtalk.com
fatwallet.com
What are yours? Usually with those and the price comparison engines such as:
pricegrabber.com
and
shopping.yahoo.com
I can get all the bases covered...

I routinely check Ben's Bargains at least once a day. It's a very good summary of all the good deals posted to message boards like Fat Wallet without the YMMV (Your Milage May Vary) or PM (PriceMatch) crap. Also, I'm sure most Slashdotters know this already but AnandTech Hot Deals Forums is a great place to get computer related deals.

Before I make any purchase online, I always send it through Pricegrabber to make sure I'm getting the lowest price, as well as check Funtasia for any coupon codes to sweeten the pot. Be sure to check the merchant ratings. It's sometimes wiser to spend a few more bucks to get it from a more reputable vendor rather than go through the headache of harassing a company to send you your stuff and later disputing a charge with the credit card company (take it from one who learned the hard way!).

Computerlandcentral breaks down the deals by date by store like many sites. However, they are also good about publishing coupon codes, where many sites (TechBargains, XPBargains, FatWallet, ...) make you click through the link to get the coupon discount. The code is really helpful if you want to start shopping some place like eBates or FatWallet, to get a small rebate on total purchase.

$91 for that "SiPix Pocket DV Camcorder" is a waste of money.... oh did you say you bought one?

The A70 is the same size but takes 3mp and 640x480 video, although it's considerably more expensive.

I realize it's an April Fool's story.

But if you are really interested in free stuff, may I suggest FatWallet's Free Stuff forum. FW is "known" for its Hot Deals forum so I imagine the Free forum would be of substance as well.

I would guess sites like Anandtech and bargainshare.net would have similar forums.

From what I understand, Froogle is very different from PriceGrabber, PriceWatch, BizRate, Yahoo! Shopping, MySimon, Nextag and others. You have to pay and provide the XML feed with your products to the search engine (or be a hosting customer of Yahoo! Stores to be listed in Yahoo! Shopping), so really in a nutshell those places are nothing more than databases, broken down into categories with database search enabled. The selection is limited.

Froogle, however, is purely search engine. Just like the Google Web search, you'll be in their database if you happen to sell something, your site has a dollar tag on it next to the product, and you're not hiding your products behind some obscure interface that search engine has no access to.

There's little technological value in PriceGrabber, PriceWatch, BizRate, DealTime, Yahoo! Shopping and others, but there's technology involved with Froogle that gives you much broader choice of vendors.

What I would like to see, although I'd admit it might be asking for too much. But you know those places that give you cashback if you shop online with them? Basically they get the affiliate comissions and then pay you back as part of the deal. eBates and FatCash are the ones I use, but there are more. It would be really nice if the shopping search engines knew that I could get a certain kick back from the amount of sale, and they would display the price like "Seller price - $399, use FatCash for additional 4% ($12) off".

That would naturally involve some kind of cooperation with the cashback site, but that would definitely add some value for the consumer. I don't see any search engine implementing it soon (after all, it would be eBates and FatCash making money off this feature, not the engine), but if Google were to implement similar program, I would sign up for it.

All hail FatWallet:

Here are some legal (in Russia!) MP3 download sites - most flat fee:

allofmp3.com
This site is locally legit and songs can be downloaded for as little as $0.01 per MB. That's around 3 cents per song.

DELit
Unusual emphasis on hard rock and metal acts (east European and Russian youth apparently worship metal acts)

3MP3.ru
$4.55 per month for unlimited downloads.

And you are not stuck with the typical iTMS low-quality 128Kbit file. Most of the Russian sites let you choose your quality and give you the option to do "online encoding" where you can select the settings you want. When the pop up screen shows up you can hit switch to advanced mode toward the bottm and you get the following options:

You can choose between the LAME or BLADE codec and 128, 160, 192, 256, and 320 kbps for each (constant bitrate). Or you can choose LAME variable bitrate at 128, 160, 192, or 256.

If you enjoy these services, 3MP3 should be your first stop to see if you can find what you are looking for at the lowest price. Then I'd move to allofmp3, followed by clubmp3.ru, and then DELit.

Cue the "In SOVIET RUSSIA" trolls now...

All hail FatWallet:

Here are some legal (in Russia!) MP3 download sites - most flat fee:

allofmp3.com
This site is locally legit and songs can be downloaded for as little as $0.01 per MB. That's around 3 cents per song.

DELit
Unusual emphasis on hard rock and metal acts (east European and Russian youth apparently worship metal acts)

3MP3.ru
$4.55 per month for unlimited downloads.

And you are not stuck with the typical iTMS low-quality 128Kbit file. Most of the Russian sites let you choose your quality and give you the option to do "online encoding" where you can select the settings you want. When the pop up screen shows up you can hit switch to advanced mode toward the bottm and you get the following options:

You can choose between the LAME or BLADE codec and 128, 160, 192, 256, and 320 kbps for each (constant bitrate). Or you can choose LAME variable bitrate at 128, 160, 192, or 256.

If you enjoy these services, 3MP3 should be your first stop to see if you can find what you are looking for at the lowest price. Then I'd move to allofmp3, followed by clubmp3.ru, and then DELit.

clicky clicky

I agree. After seeing how happy my girlfriend was with an Archos for the past 18 months, I decided to get one.

On Amazon you can get a 20GB Archos Recorder for $67 (!) after rebates, coupons, and stuff. That's an amazingly sweet deal.