I'm still 10 days away from moving into my new house. It's been a long and tedious ride flitting between my family's abodes, trying to get work done without the distractions of vacuum cleaners, needy children, cats, and day-to-day life getting in the way. But the end is in sight. Last week's column garnered a great many positive suggestions and comments from you readers, so thanks for that. I ultimately decided that my new gaming rig will be hand-built by yours truly, and it'll be a project that I'll work on over a few months; taking my time is key to ensure I do it right, and that I get the best components I can afford.

So imagine how pissed off I was when literally a few hours after I sent in The Limey #5 for editing my laptop decided to wave a little white flag and die. I say die, but that's not really fair. It works still, but the five-year-old Dell Inspiron that has served me through countless long trips, press junkets, E3s and the like has basically reached the end of its life. Right now the poor sod is sitting in a backpack with the LCD screen half hanging off. I shouldn't really go into the sordid details about how I punched the back of the screen to try and "fix" the loose connection, so I won't.

Suffice it to say that I was a bit screwed in terms of being able to, y'know, work and earn a wage. The old Dell hobbled along until yesterday, when I finally had to have the conversation with my heavily pregnant wife about how I needed to go out immediately and buy a new one, new couch, new refrigerator and new bed notwithstanding. The thing that sucks the most is the timing. Moving into a new house with very few possessions means you need a lot of cash to get basics up and running, and this was not the time for my lappy to go the way of the dodo.

What I wouldn't do for quite a lot more of this stuff...

Luckily, the Internet and its users came to the rescue. I wanted to spend as little cash as possible on a new laptop for a number of reasons. Chiefly I don't want it eating into my gaming rig fund, but we've also got to survive for another month or so until my paycheck rolls in. So the goal was to do a little bit of research online to see what I could get away with and what kinds of prices I could expect to pay for a laptop that would fulfill my basic work needs.

And wow, the price of laptops has dropped amazingly since I last looked. I trolled around Google for a while, and stumbled across a few UK-based "deal" sites. I'm sure you're all familiar with the concept: Users track down hot deals online on what seems like a by-the-minute basis and post them to these sites. Generally, the focus is on higher-priced electronics, games and computer equipment, but it can extend all the way to clothing, entertainment and even food products.

These sites (the main one I found useful was HotUKDeals are a gold mine of awesome knee-jerk purchases, and one could get carried away buying a seemingly unlimited number of USB thumb drives, spare Nintendo DS stylii or even kiddie DVDs if not careful. The sites use a hot-or-not-style rating system where the users gain reputation points for posting excellent deals. The more votes a deal gets, the hotter it becomes.