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I've been trying to talk my wife into getting a laptop for weeks and she finally gave in. She's on the computer all the time writing papers and she also got an internship where she'll be working from home. The only time I could get on the computer was when she was cooking dinner or after she went to bed. Luckily, the day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday, was coming up. I figured I could find a good deal on a laptop. Sure enough, Best Buy was going to sell a Toshiba laptop for $500 with no rebates on Friday morning only. Of course, the only specs I could find on this laptop was that it had a 1.4GHz Celeron M processor, 15" screen, 256MB of RAM, and a 40GB hard drive. Decent specs on a budget, name brand computer.
I'd heard how early people get up to stand in line for these kinds of deals on Black Friday. I got up at 4am and got in line at Best Buy at 4:15. Already by that time the line extended from the door, across the front of the store and just around the corner. I was a little worried. Would I stand out here for an hour and 45 minutes for nothing?
After freezing every part of my body and waiting for what seemed like an eternity, the Best Buy employees started going through the line and giving tickets for the very popular discounted items. To my relief, I received a ticket for the Toshiba laptop. When the doors opened at 6am it was mass chaos. I've never seen so many people in one store. Fortunately, the laptop was all that I was buying. I was able to go right to customer service, show them my ticket, and receive the laptop. After receiving it I walked over the the Geek Squad area where they service computers and asked them if this laptop had built-in wireless. I was told it didn't. Kind of a bummer but not a big deal since most any store was now selling wireless cards for $10 after rebate. I also asked if I could get a spec sheet on the laptop, but no one had one. I was a little worried that I would open it up and find a lot of things I didn't like. Then I would have to pay a 15% restocking fee if I wanted to return it.
After getting the laptop home I was quite satisfied. Its performance is quite good, the screen is nice, and it just seems to have an overall good build quality. I expected this from Toshiba since they sell a lot of their laptops to corporations.
This laptop has the Celeron M processor. This isn't the old, pokey Celeron processor that is in a lot of recent laptops and desktops. The Celeron M has a larger L2 cache which really helps in performance. I've even read that its performance is very comparable to the Pentium M processor (part of the "Centrino" marketing scam) except that battery life is not quite as good. Unless you are doing some very heavy computing (and need extreme battery life), it may be better to save some money by going with the Celeron M and just buy an extra battery.
Before I conclude, I have to address those of you who can't believe I bought something from Best Buy, the company I despise. All that I can say is that this is the one time of the year when I would shop there because a few of their prices are actually as good or better than their online competitors. Notice I say "a few". On Black Friday, there were some products that were worth getting up and standing in line for, but many were not worth it. A lot of their advertised specials you could find online almost any day of the year if you searched for it. While I was in line to pay for my laptop and watching the crazed crowd grab just about anything they could find, I had to chuckle. It was a shame that they didn't know about GeekyJock.com. If they did, they would realize that they got up really early and fought the crowds to buy a lot of stuff that they could get online for the same price any day!
