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Ouch. I used to use Mwave, and there's always Street Prices. I'd be as interested as you, though, in what alternatives are out there.

streetprices.com

are you sure?

Inte did produce a Pentium III 400MHz. It was one of their "Mobile" processors.

The worst part of this all is that the "new" price of $399 is horrible. They are also trying to shirk with a $30 coupon. Link below.

Here are a few links to show you how to find a deal on this card, Vision Tek part number 30001522 :

Pricewatch Search for 30001522

Tip on searching Pricewatch (my favorite); the url format is: [http://brook.pricewatch.com/search/search.asp?cri teria=item_criteria_here]

Streetprices Search for 30001522

Pricegrabber Search, I don't like Price-grabber, but its here to show that even a crappy Shylock engine is better than Worst Buy ©(TM)®.

BEST BUY charged with FRAUD:
Best Buy & HRS Credit Insurance Fraud to their customers. Big Ripoff Scam!

Story also covered here:
http://www.theinquirer.net/10020202.htm

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/24005.html

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/19176/

http://courses.wcupa.edu/jredingt/BestBuy.htm

http://www.hardocp.com/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/24041 . tml Worst Buy Highway Robbery Inc. Trying to give only $30 bucks for mistake.

http://hypothermia.gamershardware.com/

http://hypothermia.gamershardware.com/articles/bes tbuy_gf4deal.html

http://hypothermia.gamershardware.com/articles/bb_ arrest.html

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/4/24/11357/3033 .

I have had horrible experience with them as well. I won't even go into it, but they tried to do something fraudulent and were obstinate about owning up to it.

I had a similar Problem with Buy.COM and there was a class action lawsuit and 3 years later I got a $60 coupon for my troubles. I would have liked to have gotten a $50 Hitachi monitor for th $163 dollars they promised it for.

It has been committed in history FORVER, here:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&frame=right& th=5c9f98e92d07422b&seekm=36C0A7EF.7AF4%40uclink4. berkeley.edu#link1

I have had horrible experience with them as well. I won't even go into it, but they tried to do something fraudulent and were obstinate about owning up to it.

The worst part of this all is that the "new" price of $399 is horrible.

Here are a few links to show you how to find a deal on this card, Vision Tek part number 30001522 :

Pricewatch Search for 30001522

Tip on searching Pricewatch (my favorite); the url format is: [http://brook.pricewatch.com/search/search.asp?cri teria=item_criteria_here]

Streetprices Search for 30001522

Pricegrabber Search, I don't like Price-grabber, but its here to show that even a crappy Shylock engine is better than Worst Buy ©(TM)®.

BEST BUY charged with FRAUD:
Best Buy & HRS Credit Insurance Fraud to their customers. Big Ripoff Scam!

Story also covered here:
http://www.theinquirer.net/10020202.htm

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/24005.html

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/19176/

http://courses.wcupa.edu/jredingt/BestBuy.htm

http://www.hardocp.com/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/24041 . tml Worst Buy Highway Robbery Inc. Trying to give only $30 bucks for mistake.

http://hypothermia.gamershardware.com/

http://hypothermia.gamershardware.com/articles/bes tbuy_gf4deal.html

http://hypothermia.gamershardware.com/articles/bb_ arrest.html

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/4/24/11357/3033 .

I have had horrible experience with them as well. I won't even go into it, but they tried to do something fraudulent and were obstinate about owning up to it.

The worst part of this all is that the "new" price of $399 is horrible.

Here are a few links to show you how to find a deal on this card, Vision Tek part number 30001522 :

Pricewatch Search for 30001522

Tip on searching Pricewatch (my favorite); the url format is: [http://brook.pricewatch.com/search/search.asp?cri teria=item_criteria_here]

Streetprices Search for 30001522

Pricegrabber Search, I don't like Price-grabber, but its here to show that even a crappy Shylock engine is better than Worst Buy ©(TM)®.

BEST BUY charged with FRAUD:
Best Buy & HRS Credit Insurance Fraud to their customers. Big Ripoff Scam!

Story also covered here:
http://www.theinquirer.net/10020202.htm

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/24005.html

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/19176/

http://courses.wcupa.edu/jredingt/BestBuy.htm

http://www.hardocp.com/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/24041 . tml Worst Buy Highway Robbery Inc. Trying to give only $30 bucks for mistake.

http://hypothermia.gamershardware.com/

http://hypothermia.gamershardware.com/articles/bes tbuy_gf4deal.html

http://hypothermia.gamershardware.com/articles/bb_ arrest.html

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/4/24/11357/3033 .

BACK to hard drives, I have had great success with both Maxtor and IBM, and reasonably high success with Seagate SCSI - just not Medalist drives or the types with the nasty-medalist fluid bearing design, some barracudas (none RECENT) suffer from this. I have seen many IDE drives fail, usually on lower memory systems when lots of thrashing / swapping occurs, and secretary's need to have every "office" application open along with www.revlon.com.

Outside of that, since I work in IT, I have seen obscene failure rates with Western Digital products - there are have been times when ONTRACK got $3000+ for someone's hard drive having been failed, needs the "CRITICAL" data, blah blah blah (learn to backup - beeeotch, need to be a BOFH.) Dell was putting these garbage 6GB WDs in the Optiplex systems for a while and were really good at saying F**k You when you wanted them to do something extra nice when the broken hard drive cost you money and downtime. Cute Dell.

Aside from the nasty 75GXP, particularly the ones made in Hungary, the new IBM drives and especially the 120GXP drives are simply superior in performance, I'll get back to you in a few months on MBTF on the 120GXP, but I don't suspect any problems, plus I do in fact check the SMART status with the superior IBM support disks to see if any shit is about to hit the fan. The 60GXP was very reliable, but I never got in more than 3-4 months on that one. None of my drives ever spin down or get shut off, I think cycling the power all the time can piss drives off as well - just a superstition. For Win32 victims, there is decent SMART Defender software to give you an early heads up, I'm sure some *nix variant of SMART polling has appeared or will, I just don't care to monitor *nix operations that carefully because impending hardware failure seems to be easier to see coming... Just a feeling.

Touching on power once again, I would also suggest a PC Power and Cooling (overpriced) or an ENERMAX power supply, there are many other decent vendors, but these seem to get the job done, have a medusa pile of wires - more than any case needs, and are relatively quiet and reliable.

Watch the temp on some of the hard drives as well, keeping the airflow good is essential. I kept an 18GB HDD on for almost 3 years straight until I got my 60GXP (soon to be upgraded to a 120GXP =), and I have had several SCSI drives in other machines as well, and thank goodness knock on wood never had any HDD failure.

Try looking on www.streetprices.com or www.pricewatch.com

Don't pay for a store to staff a bunch of dropouts who don't know SCSI from IDE try to twist your arm into buy a Brio or Presario piece of trash that litter the sales floor.

Maxtor drive are for the most part okay, I have had the most drive failures with Western Digital and will never solicit them, and I've seen the old fluid bearing Seagate 7200 RPM die all the time.

IBM for the most part is good, but the GCP drives I heard are flaky, I believe there is a new "family coming out which will restore reliability.

As for your RMAs, call them and a demand a new drive. I have done this several times with Quantum/Maxtor, I have even gotten next generation SCSI drives after a failure - as you are entitles to this. I have said, "If I don't get a new, sealed drive, I'll just RMA right back.

Will it *really* play the DVD-Audio content, or is it actually playing the information stored in the video section of the DVD? Most DVD-Audio discs have Dolby 5.1 audio stored in the *video* section of the disc so that incompatible DVD players won't completely choke on the DVD-Audio only format.

As for where I retrieved those numbers, you can check out one of Pioneer's DVD-Audio player, the DV-AX10, at this URL: http://www.pioneerelectronics.com/Pioneer/CDA/Home Products/HomeProductDetails/0,1422,2092,00.html or you can check out their "Elite" model DVD-Audio (and video) player, the DV-38A at this URL: http://www.pioneerelectronics.com/Pioneer/CDA/Home Products/HomeProductDetails/0,1422,2060,00.html (and see prices via StreetPrices.com at http://www.streetprices.com/Computers/search.pl?qu ery=DV-38A, as of this writing, the price is $997, a fair shake off of the retail of $2,200).

And I was wrong, they want $6,000 for their first model right off the bat, but I'm sure the street price is probably half that (I can't find the first model I listed on StreetPrices though, so, shrug..).

Anyways, the reason I'm interested is 1) because I'm curious if DVD-Audio is possible on PC DVD-ROM drives and 2) I'm curious if there's cheaper solutions that still let you get at the real DVD-Audio and not the Dolby 5.1 stored in the Video area. Dolby 5.1 is probably a step above CD quality, but full blown DVD Audio (from what I've heard and read) is far better in quality than either of those alternatives.

BTW: To the other posters on this story-- thanks for your information, it's been educational and interesting. Thanks! =)

Someone else mentioned Streetprices.Com, but did not mention that there are graphs there. For example, run down through the Notebook pages and you'll find pages like this one with a chart of prices.

Someone else mentioned Streetprices.Com, but did not mention that there are graphs there. For example, run down through the Notebook pages and you'll find pages like this one with a chart of prices.

...at the moment I haven't been able to find a definitive or comprehensive list on the 'net.
You can find charts for specific products by doing a 'Webferret' search - but then you're only talking about street prices, which are beaten daily on the internet, and are really only 'guide prices' for most products on the high street.
If you're buying, your best bet is to cross reference a list of available components with sites like:
Streetprices.com - perhaps one of the best sites
cnet - does some price comparisons

If you're still doing research then why not go to some of the component-specific sites on the web, such as http://www.motherboards.org/ and the like. They often have articles that deal with price fluctuations. Your fav computer mag.'s web site no doubt also has a littany of articles on the subject with decent research in them.
But methinks the resource you're after would be valuable to marketing students more than anyone else - if that's your thrust then I suggest you go to the manufacturer's web pages ( should you be trying to get geeks to do your marketing project for you? :). Seriously, I think the reason such a site isn't about at the moment is that such information can be used to do exactly what you want to do - the large firms probably wouldn't want geeks and non-geeks to suss out how the whole 'product life-cycle' and 'price-cycle' works and disrupt the whole thing. For the moment your just going to have to use that power that lies somewhere between 'the force' and 'the knack' and kinda guesstimate when prices are about to fall.
8)

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