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...in case anyone wants to know.
http://www.pricescan.com/electronics/items/item527 336.asp?sid=G5120995

And here's its specs.

Where can you buy Demon Days for less than $15?

Try here. There are several stores with it for less than $15 including shipping.

Yes, and before that they had probably dropping really, really slowly down to $200 for quite some time as processor prices has been stagnant for the last 1-2 years. People who bought these processors just when prices stagnated have had them almost "for free" until a few weeks ago. People who bought them a few weeks ago have already seen the price of their new processor cut to half.

You can also pull data like that off of pricescan.com for individual parts (but not overall). For example, the Athlon64 X2 3800+ was ~$350 in Oct 2005 and only dropped to ~$300 by Jun 2005. The X2 4200+ started around $500 in Aug 2005 and was only down to $400 by Jun 2005.

Which was a bit annoying from the consumer-side, because the prices never dropped like we hoped they would after the initial rollout. (Heck, we still haven't seen price breaks on the Opteron lines. And I think those are now overpriced compared to the Intel Core 2 Duo chips.)

Still, I've heard rumors that there's another round of price breaks coming from AMD within a few months (October). But that only seems to be on the Turion mobile chips and the low-end Sempron chips.

A price of $80 for the X2 3800+ would be nice after all this waiting... the $150 price is pretty good, but more is always nicer.

Um, 500GB drives have been available on the market for about 10+ months now (maybe a bit longer). They represent the upper end of what longitudinal recording was capable of packing into a 3.5" form factor.

The advent of perpendicular recording from multiple vendors (Hitachi has been dragging their heels on a 3.5" PR drive) will hopefully drive prices down on the 500GB and 750GB drives. Or at least accellerate the price drops.

AMD's slashing prices 30-50% at the end of this month. The X2 3800+ will be in the vicinity of $170.

Good news, everyone!

Seriously, the price trend graph over at PriceScan shows just how flat pricing for the X2's has been. The average price as $375 last October and has only fallen to $325 recently. The low-price was $350 last October and is now only down to ~$300.

The Athlon64 X2 4200+ 939pin shows the same pattern. Fairly stale pricing for the past 6 months.

On the Intel side, the Intel Pentium D 930 3.0GHz price has been trending steadily downward for about 3 months.

AMD's slashing prices 30-50% at the end of this month. The X2 3800+ will be in the vicinity of $170.

Good news, everyone!

Seriously, the price trend graph over at PriceScan shows just how flat pricing for the X2's has been. The average price as $375 last October and has only fallen to $325 recently. The low-price was $350 last October and is now only down to ~$300.

The Athlon64 X2 4200+ 939pin shows the same pattern. Fairly stale pricing for the past 6 months.

On the Intel side, the Intel Pentium D 930 3.0GHz price has been trending steadily downward for about 3 months.

AMD's slashing prices 30-50% at the end of this month. The X2 3800+ will be in the vicinity of $170.

Good news, everyone!

Seriously, the price trend graph over at PriceScan shows just how flat pricing for the X2's has been. The average price as $375 last October and has only fallen to $325 recently. The low-price was $350 last October and is now only down to ~$300.

The Athlon64 X2 4200+ 939pin shows the same pattern. Fairly stale pricing for the past 6 months.

On the Intel side, the Intel Pentium D 930 3.0GHz price has been trending steadily downward for about 3 months.

It's an Opteron 246 chip (well, actually a pair of them, but TrueCrypt 4.2 isn't multi-threaded yet) from around early 2005. I know it wasn't top of the line when I bought it (I think the 248s were out by then).

It's the 2GHz core with 3GB of PC3200 RAM running WinXP Pro 32bit. The motherboard is a Tyan Tiger K8W S2875 with a slightly odd memory path. Only one of the Opterons is connected to the memory, the 2nd Opteron routes its memory access through the first one. It's not ideal, but it was the smallest form factor dual-CPU motherboard I could find at the time. (The newer K8WE S2877 has separate memory banks for each CPU.)

At some point I'll upgrade to the S2877 board with a pair of dual-core Opterons. Probably the 280s (2.4GHz) once they get below the $250-$300 mark.

I dug up my prices from May 9th's check:

IDE/PATA
200GB $85 - $0.42/GB
250GB $95 - $0.38/GB
300GB $120 - $0.40/GB
400GB $220 - $0.55/GB
500GB $290 - $0.58/GB
750GB $495 - $0.66/GB

SATA
200GB $85 - $0.42/GB
250GB $95 - $0.38/GB
300GB $120 - $0.40/GB
400GB $180 - $0.45/GB
500GB $275 - $0.55/GB
750GB $480 - $0.64/GB

Most sizes show a ~$0.05/GB price drop in just a few weeks. Probably not unusual when a new, larger sized drive hits the market.

They probably could've charged a higher premium for those 750GB drives and they'd still sell. Price trend graphs are still pretty flat (PATA and SATA).

I dug up my prices from May 9th's check:

IDE/PATA
200GB $85 - $0.42/GB
250GB $95 - $0.38/GB
300GB $120 - $0.40/GB
400GB $220 - $0.55/GB
500GB $290 - $0.58/GB
750GB $495 - $0.66/GB

SATA
200GB $85 - $0.42/GB
250GB $95 - $0.38/GB
300GB $120 - $0.40/GB
400GB $180 - $0.45/GB
500GB $275 - $0.55/GB
750GB $480 - $0.64/GB

Most sizes show a ~$0.05/GB price drop in just a few weeks. Probably not unusual when a new, larger sized drive hits the market.

They probably could've charged a higher premium for those 750GB drives and they'd still sell. Price trend graphs are still pretty flat (PATA and SATA).

$413 sounds pricey until, as you noted, you do the math for the $/GB amount. For being a leading-edge drive, the price per GB is rather competitive.

The following prices are estimates based on www.pricescan.com. There could be as much as +/- 10% variation in prices.

PATA drive prices
120GB $64 - $0.53/GB
160GB $70 - $0.44/GB
200GB $75 - $0.38/GB
250GB $80 - $0.32/GB
300GB $105 - $0.35/GB
400GB $195 - $0.49/GB
500GB $260 - $0.52/GB
750GB $490 - $0.65/GB

SATA Drive prices ($/GB)
120GB $68 - $0.57/GB
160GB $65 - $0.41/GB
200GB $76 - $0.38/GB
250GB $80 - $0.32/GB
300GB $105 - $0.35/GB
400GB $175 - $0.44/GB
500GB $250 - $0.50/GB
750GB $434 - $0.58/GB

Most items over at www.pricescan.com have price trend charts. It's not a chart for the overall category, just charts for each individual item.

(I've been using PriceScan for quite a few years... maybe as far back as 1998? I still end up ordering from places like NewEgg or MWave.com or TheNerds.net but it's good for seeing prices.)

Why is this modded informative. The poster has no clue. Pick a decoder. Terrestrial Receiver/Decoders have been out for at least 4 years.

go to http://pricescan.com/, its an awsome place too

I use Price Scan (http://www.pricescan.com/)

Several places, including Newegg have this mouse for $49.99 - just go to pricescan

Not bad on finding some stuff

http://pricescan.com/

This is nifty news.

Because I have an XP computer. And an XP notebook.

And I just ordered me a Nixon CoolPix 8800 as my Christmas present to me.

Guaranteed delivery Friday, the man said. Of course, he had a Noo Yawk accent and sounded like he was smiling a little too hard...

So I may be spending Xmas day taking super-sharp pictures with "the Nikon touch" color balance and messing them up in a tool that doesn't take 8 clicks and a foray into a semantic hall of mirrors to find something as simple as the contrast and brightness controls.

[p.s. when ordering from "back-east" camera houses, CALL and ask what's in the box; if it weren't for a snafu with the shipping address, I'd never have talked to them, and I'd never have found out that the reason they offered it almost $150 below everyone else was that it was a "camera-only" OEM package, esentially reselling a warranty replacement distribution, without things like, oh, the special rechargable battery, lens cap, etc...and this year's models are coming without an included SD card or CompactFlash drive, probably because they were getting a lot of requests to delete those because by now most camera-hacks have a stack of nicer ones than the mfg's were shipping in the kit...]

Oh, and I just have to link this cool picture of the unpainted body: cool picture of the unpainted body from one of the reviews.

</brag>

"I won't have to buy a hard drive which at the best deal I can find is about $130 US"

Which is silly of the submitter because if you simply go and look at PriceScan.com and search for Notebook Hard Drives, 20GB notebook hard drives are only $70. Which is a far cry from $130 and a heck of a lot cheaper then any flash-based media is going to be.

Not to mention that the submitter is being lazy and not looking on Ebay or one of the online auction sites.

PATA prices: PriceScan.com

120GB - $80 ($0.67/GB)
160GB - $90 ($0.56/GB)
200GB - $110 ($0.55/GB)
250GB - $160 ($0.64/GB)
300GB - $230 ($0.76/GB), 5400rpm only

5400rpm 250GB drives are more like $190 ($0.75/GB)

For a RAID array (assuming 8 disk controller like one of the Escalades):

8 x $110 = $880
controller card = $500
MB / CPU / RAM = $400
case = $200
total cost around $2000
net space 6 x 200GB (~1.1TB), $1.78/GB

As you can see, it ain't the disks that are the problem in an ATA RAID, it's the controller card, case and components. Plus, I'm allowing for a hot-spare and RAID5. Probably can't save the cash on the case, but you might be able to ditch the controller card and save some cash on the MB/CPU/RAM. That cuts the cost to around $1300 for the hardware or $1.16/GB.

Biggest SCSI drive is 146GB (call it 140GB for planning purposes) and those are $500 each. To build a 1.1TB array requires 10 discs (9 in a RAID5 plus 1 hotspare). SCSI controller card is at least $300, plus the $100 cables, plus the MB/CPU/RAM (figure $200 min) and the $200 case. So $600 for the box to hold the drives plus $5000 worth of SCSI drives works out to $5.00/GB.

Maybe as much as $7.50/GB for SCSI compared to a realistic $1.75-$2.00/GB for IDE/SATA. That's not even considering the costs of backup drives and tape.

My question is, where do you go to buy a harddrive nowadays at a good price. I've been looking at pricewatch for sometime, and I realized today that the prices there are too low to be true. Plus if you look at the feedback its miserable.

pricescan.com for the price searching, then either NewEgg, TheNerds.net, Computers4Sure or MWave. I've done business with all 4 companies with nary a complaint.

Best prices, barring sales/rebates, are the 160GB drives if you're only looking at $/GB. However, once you factor in electricity costs (a 10W drive running 24x7 eats roughly $0.60/mo), the 200GB drives may win out over the course of a year.

Electricity costs are why it's foolish to build a 15-drive array using 80GB drives instead of a 5-drive array using 250GB drives. Not only do you have more drives that can fail, but they likely put off the 3x same thermal load as the fewer 250GB drives, and power requirements between the 80GB drive and the 250GB drive might only differ by 20%. So that 15-drive array is sucking down 150W while the 5-drive array is sipping down 50W (roughly $6/mo cost differential).

PriceScan is a price search engine with a difference: It lets you look for things that are "functionally equivalent" to your search terms. I often find results for stores that don't show up on PriceWatch, PriceGrabber, or MySimon.

I often use PriceScan and PriceGrabber, among some of the others already mentioned by others. PriceGrabber even has a link under "Services" here on /.

Just thought it was interesting to see, since we now have 200gig HDs

Check your rear-view mirrors more closely... that's a 300Gb drive passing you by (Maxtor 300GB Ultra ATA/133 for only ~$275-$290). Price is falling pretty nicely for them too (when they came out in September they were $350).

Of course, we saw the same arguments that you quoted there when the 300Gb drives came out... does the world need this yet? Unless this is in a RAID, would you really want to trust 300 gigs on a single drive? What would you use this for?...

http://bestbookbuys.com (compares prices for books accross most online bookstores)
http://consumerreports.com (untainted consumer information, subscription required)
http://edmunds.com (a good read before you buy a car)
http://insweb.com (cheap online insurance agency with a number of insurance providers)
http://www.ftc.gov (to learn your rights as a consumer or as a business)
http://forums.ebay.com/db1/forum.jsp?forum=107 (scams performed on Ebay -- good read for Ebay newcomers)
http://resellerratings.com (to check the track record of electronics resellers, some of the cheapest electronics resellers are one-fly-night operations that take your money one day, go bankrupt the next, and restart the day after under a new name)
http://pricewatch.com or http://pricescan.com (compares prices on pc hardware and electronics)
http://techbargains.com
http://bottomdollar.com

shopper.com is OK, but there are some better alternatives IMHO. pricescan.com and pricewatch.com both offer more merchants and, as a result, will usually find you a lower price.

Go to PriceScan and look for Windows XP. I did just now. You can get the home edition for $85 and the pro version for $135. Not quite $300 is it? Also when the hell did it ever sell for that much? Even when it came out I only saw it for $200!

http://www.pricescan.com/items/item129347.asp

Which is why you buy the afforementioned Zaurus. And oh yeah, did I mention they're almost as cheap as the Kaii's retail these days?

In fact, a friend bought his Zaurus for 265USD+tax a week ago due to some price-matching trickery, rebates, and another special at Office Depot or Office Max (I forget which).

(Of course, I have limited my searching to sites such as Pricescan and PriceWatch.

Shot off an email and it got fixed. Apparently it's a relatively small company, so someone was listening.

--

I AGREE! Local shops have always been the best solution for me, be it here in New York City where I now live, or Miami, Philly or D.C., where I've lived before.

In fact, I just built a new system, mostly with parts from a local shop. I preshopped at pricescan, which I think is much better than pricecrotch for accurate low prices. Then, I took price printouts with me to the shop, haggled with the salesman, and got a terrific deal on most of the components I wanted. One thing he didn't have (60GB 7200RPM HDD), I got from Spartan Technologies. And CompUSA had an amazing, unbeatable deal on one other item I wanted (CD-RW).

Before the explosion of the commercial Web, I did the same thing with catalogs or ads from Computer Shopper -- snip 'em and take 'em to the local guy.

Roughly, when I built my home PC, I started here:

http://arstechnica.com/guide/system/index.html

They regularly update their 3 machine specifications: God Box, Hot Rod Box, and Budget Box, inorder or price and goodies, of course. But what they mostly include is advice on buying what parts, why to buy them, what to look for if you're not buying that exact part, and how to buy the parts you need for the best price. The last part is most important. You can buy the same piece of hardware you need at many places on the net. The key is getting it the cheapest. The price comparison places I've been using are:

http://www.pricegrabber.com/
http://www.mysimon.com/
http://www.pricescan.com/
http://www.dealtime.com/

Some other people said getting your cpu, mem, and mobo from one place. I'd like to say almost that. CPU and mobo, for sure. But I always buy my memory from

http://www.crucial.com

It's just not worth risking on something so cheap.

it was required reading in my CS department's capstone class at college... good book, good requirement.

Remember, there's a difference between the 'aura' (in Walter Benjamin's sense) of the product and that of the reseller. If Advertised Sexy Brand X is available from Not-advertising Unsexy Reseller A at half the price of Advertising Sexy Reseller B, then I 'enjoy' (or am manipulated by) the aura of X by purchasing from B, and the cost of the Sexiness is picked up by A. This is an advantage the only the internet consumer enjoys -it's been demonstrated that poor people are likely to pay more for the same goods - like cars - as rich people, and it has been hypothesized that internet access is a primary factor in that fact.

According to Pricescan, Philips 14-hour TiVo are available for $99.88 from Amazon.

Brick and mortar stores have cheaper prices than online, eh?

• I guess that
• these sites have
• a lot to learn
• about that then ;-)

I haven't had the chance to try it yet, but there are places offering the Fuji Finepix 6900 for just over $500. It shoots at up to 2832 x 2128, which comes out to a little better than 6 Megapixels. Pretty amazing for the price (I paid about $800 for my 640X480 digicam three or so years ago - being an early adopter is lame). I wonder how much it compresses the image, and more practically how long it takes it to stuff an image that size into it's memory. It probably shoots at something like .01 fps at that resolution heh.

--SONET

I think they mean that is is sub-100 to use an existing computer as a WAP: add one of several sub-100 WiFi cards to an existing PC running Linux (free) and you have a sub-100 WAP (I guess). The cheapest REAL WAP I can find is 185 bucks for the USR access point. Asante, D-Link, and 3-Com are not too far behind (190s), ditto Netgear, Linksys, and on up to Lucent and Cisco. As for myself, I've had my Orinoco setup for about a year now, my wife loves it, my immediate neighbors love it, and I'd like to spread it across my apartment complex but we are not allowed external antennae :) I'll have to give the Pringles can idea a shot...

• Now if only the right motherboards would start showing up in quantity on pricewatch ...

It isn't networking, but it will allow you to get more than a floppy's worth of information out of a system at a time. SmartDisk makes a product called the FlashPath, which allows you to read and write to smart media or sony memory sticks through a PC's floppy drive. In short, you'd be able to read/write up to 64mb of data at a time (and soon, 128mb). It does require a driver to be installed in the PC to be used, but it will allow you to get more data in and out without any hardware modifications at all... just a quick driver install (and yes, the driver will fit on a floppy and is available for Win9x/NT/2000, Mac and Linux here).

Oh yeah, it'll run you US$89.95 at the SmartDisk store with a 16Mb SmartMedia card, or you can head over to PriceScan's Digital Film Readers section and find one for under US$60 without a card.

Some day I hope to have a .plan.

It isn't networking, but it will allow you to get more than a floppy's worth of information out of a system at a time. SmartDisk makes a product called the FlashPath, which allows you to read and write to smart media or sony memory sticks through a PC's floppy drive. In short, you'd be able to read/write up to 64mb of data at a time (and soon, 128mb). It does require a driver to be installed in the PC to be used, but it will allow you to get more data in and out without any hardware modifications at all... just a quick driver install (and yes, the driver will fit on a floppy and is available for Win9x/NT/2000, Mac and Linux here).

Oh yeah, it'll run you US$89.95 at the SmartDisk store with a 16Mb SmartMedia card, or you can head over to PriceScan's Digital Film Readers section and find one for under US$60 without a card.

Some day I hope to have a .plan.

(Component prices from pricescan.com)

$509 PIII-933MHz
85 20GB HD
99 128 MB 133MHz SDRAM
175* 17" M781 monitor
150* 32 MB NVIDIA TNT2 M64 AGP
35 48x CD-ROM,
24 SB 64V
50* Altec Lansing ACS-340 speaker system
15 3C905C ethernet card
60* Some sort of motherboard
50* Basic Keyboard and Mouse, case & power supply
???? and a 1 year service policy.

======
$1252.00

For a savings of $417 from the Dell price, you can build it yourself (minus any extra shipping costs for the separate parts, of course). The only problem is there's no support. Of course, for that much, you should be able to hire a consultant to fix it.

(* Specific item not found at pricescan. Estimated based on similar products)

Very interesting post. But how come Buy.com and BarnesandNoble.com haven't taken advantage of this latest uproar of an Amazon policy. If I was ecommerce director of either competitor, I would have links to the CNet article on the front page of my website. Not only that, but price comparision search engines (PriceScan MySimon PriceWatch DealTime Shopper) should be having a field day with this!

Perhaps Buy and Barnes & Noble are conducting the SAME experiment but at a more discreet level?!?!

Amazon has taken its fair-share of heat on Slashdot. I remember that the uproar when Amazon patented "one-click shopping". IMHO, that was well deserved, but Amazon has invented new shopping "technologies" that I like.

I definitely like the wish lists. It's easy to add stuff to my wish list and update it when I purchase something. Also, it's nice to be able to publish wish lists and read other's wish lists especially when you want to surprise a loved one with a gift. Also, I like the Amazon Purchase Circles. It's interesting to browse the Purchase Circles and find out what books the Microserfs are buying.

This latest instant price changing incident is perhaps the latest Amazon shopping innovation being tested. Brick and mortar stores change prices often and track their customer purchase habits with all the specialty card programs. Amazon just has the luxury of changing prices at "Internet speed" simply because they ARE the largest retail store on the Internet.

This is a classic example of market manipulation and how the Internet is changing the ideals of traditional retail. If you don't like it, there are plenty of choices. Nobody is forcing you to purchase items at Amazon's prices. Everytime you purchase something on Amazon you do so at your own free will, at the price stated. If you don't like the price, then don't buy it. There are plenty of places to do some comparison shopping if you don't like Amazon. I use PriceScan.

Regarding the Amazon customer service, they are probably just doing some damage control. Amazon's main customer service center is in North Dakota and they're probably not up to speed on the plans at the Seattle headquarters. I take everything customer service says with a grain of salt.

Well the game looks like a perfect fit for someone like me, even if it is 'Quake 2'. For one, at least it's a few different maps. Second, it runs on an NT machine which doesn't happen to be owned by someone with enough cash to drop on a P-III and a massive video card. And, you can get Daikatana from buy.com for $32.94 plus shipping. Using one of these coupons and the price goes down to $22.94 plus shipping or $32.94 with no shipping. Thanks to pricescan.com and amazing-bargains.com for finding the price and coupon, respectively. The point being, go out, buy the game, judge for yourself. If nothing else the story, whatever its faults, seems original enough to perhaps at least prod the FPS world out of the 'boom boom boom' mode (even if not in the same way as Thief 2). Of course, nothing looks as cool as what the people over at artifact entertainment are doing: Demise and Horizons. Both labors of love in their own right. (Demise is, btw, the successor to Mordor, and was formerly called 'Infinite Worlds'.) Demise is out and ready for order, and Horizons is pretty alpha atm.

• fatbrain.com {.}
• bookpool.com
• alldirect.com
• kingbooks.com
• borders.com

And of course, it's always best to do a search for the cheapest price at places like pricescan.com

Their $999.99 DVD player is available from some places for just over $700 (compare prices at, say, pricescan. This is to be expected from the home of the $80 "free software" CD, I guess.

I've seen a 50-inch screen go for "only" 8.5k$ at pricescan

the exact address for the item is here

couldn't find more information on it on sony's site though. but for almost 1/3 the price, it's probably a better pick even if it isn't flat.


another issue. did anyone ever ponder the sheer mass of these things? i just look at my computer desk now, and i wonder if it could stand the load.

also, quite a few desk models can't hold a 50" monitor in them.

but then again, if you spend 20k$ on a monitor, buying a table shouldn't be that much of an issue.


as for the resolution... it'll probably look real grainy :( so much for the ultimate quake experience.

I've seen a 50-inch screen go for "only" 8.5k$ at pricescan

the exact address for the item is here

couldn't find more information on it on sony's site though. but for almost 1/3 the price, it's probably a better pick even if it isn't flat.


another issue. did anyone ever ponder the sheer mass of these things? i just look at my computer desk now, and i wonder if it could stand the load.

also, quite a few desk models can't hold a 50" monitor in them.

but then again, if you spend 20k$ on a monitor, buying a table shouldn't be that much of an issue.


as for the resolution... it'll probably look real grainy :( so much for the ultimate quake experience.

From the website(s):

• Boxed set includes 106 cards, 4 blank cards, 160 money tokens, two dice, and a rulebook
• ISBN 1-55634-091-5
• Price $34.95 (pre-orders)

Not yet listed at amazon.com or bn.com, but you will find the lowest price with PriceSCAN