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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nokia xpressmusic 5300 - Free Applications and Games Available on Nokia Site

I discovered today that there are some pretty cool applications available for nokia phones, and in particular the phone I'm using. If you go to nokia's european site, you can download some free apps. I found "sensor" a bluetooth mobile social networking program, a 3D snakes game, a decent snowboarding game, and a unit conversion tool. When looking on the US nokia site these apps are not to be found. The apps installed using nokia's pc suite program without difficulty. I do have my phone set to think it's a british phone though to get around t-mobile's blocking of java programs from their cheaper internet service, so this might have helped.

Why does Europe get cooler stuff that the US does without additional cost? I'm not sure. I recommend using NSS and setting your phone up this way if the programs don't work for you.

The program I was really looking for was the nokia sensor app. It allows you to see other phones with the application running and thus see if friends are nearby or meet people. It's probably something like the helios buddy beacon. Of course, if nobody else around is able to run the application then it's worthless.

As for a review of this phone, I haven't found the music buttons to be very useful so if I hadn't enabled these extra features and applications (I also have installed msn's search program that can show live traffic and google maps and mail) then this phone would be a complete piece of junk.

As it is I'm rather happy with it, although I can't wait for a google phone.

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TV on your computer

Why get satellite or cable anymore if you have hi-speed? I don't know. Two new services are running now, joost and graboid.

Joost just came out in beta and is awesome with a great interface and lots of things to watch. You can find all the shows you'd have a hard time finding on cable and would need a dvr to record if you have, like, a work or play life. You can also chat with others watching the channel, although nobody was when I was there, which is fine with me. There are some options for news too but they are quite limited and dated now, don't expect news flashes as of yet. The video quality is pretty good too. The best part is that it's free! This does mean that it has advertisements in between the shows, but it seems much better than normal tv.

Get Joost

Graboid has some subscription options for different download quotas.
Graboid will also let you save videos, but it's really just a newsgroup aggregator. I'm not sure how long it will be around since it let's you get movies that are in theaters, and I don't think it's paying the studios for that privilege.

Get Graboid