Toshiba A215-7437 and how to get stuff cheap on black friday without the lines

The Toshiba A215-7437 was a recent black friday deal at circuit city. It is $399 after rebates. Of course, these deals are meant to get you in the store. Now there are some interesting things about circuit city, one is that they have a 30 day price matching guarantee, if they or someone else has a sale within 30 days of purchase they'll price match it. Of course in the store they put up signs saying no returns and no price matching on black friday. What I did was go buy the laptop on Wednesday before it went on sale, went back to the store on the afternoon of black friday, and returned and bought it again. I didn't have any lines and got a receipt for a new purchase. The important thing to do here is that you can't open up the box until you've made the purchase successfully at the sale price. Their return policy charges a restocking fee for opened items.

This notebook computer is pretty decent, especially for the price. On the negative the battery life doesn't appear very good, and it lacks infrared and bluetooth. Also, the AMD Athlon X2 64 TK-53 processor is only about as fast as an Athlon XP 2700+ in benchmarks at 32 bits. Although it would be faster with a 64 bit operating system it ships with Vista Home Premium's 32 bit version, and drivers are not readily available in 64 bits. Hopefully they will be available at some point. The 1GB of memory isn't enough for Vista, especially since the memory is shared with the integrated ATI Xpress video.

Still though, this machine is a dual core machine, and while one thing is about as fast as an XP 2700+ it can do two at once. I run boinc and it runs two processes at the same time at that speed. You can also download applications from AMD that show you how your cpu's are doing.

I'm quite happy with this purchase, but it doesn't quite compete with much more expensive intel core 2 duo machines.

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