It turns out that there's no better way to get up-to-the-minute deals, and while you'd expect the vast majority of these hot deals to stem from online retailers, a great number of them are actually found in High Street shops.

This is how I met up with my shiny new Acer cheap-as-you-like lappy. For the bargain price of 360 GBP (that's roughly $525) I got myself a fantastic deal from my local supermarket. Yes, supermarket. No big-name electronic retailers here. It was sitting in my local Tesco next to some on-sale pots and pans and had 100 GBP ($140) knocked off the original retail price. It still pained me to have to buy the bloody thing in the first place, but after five hours of using it I'm officially smitten. On to the specs.

The Acer Aspire 5735Z has 3GB of RAM, a 250MB hard drive, Intel Pentium Dual-Core processor clocked at 2.16Ghz, and a gorgeous 15.6" HD LCD screen. Did I mention it's got a wireless LAN card that does a/b/g and n? What about a gigabit LAN card? Just insane value for money, and leagues ahead of my ancient Dell.

These anonymous Internet users approve of my purchase.

The lappy is running Vista Basic, which I was a little nervous about honestly; my experiences with Vista up to this point have been less than stellar, to say the least, but so far so good. I killed all the pre-installed crap that shipped with the machine, and it runs like a dream. It also runs very quietly and does not heat up at all (the Dell used to burn my legs after about 20 minutes of constant activity).

It is, however, a complete donkey in terms of gaming. It's got an integrated video card which can share the system's RAM, but I'm not going to even bother trying to install any games on it. It's a workhorse and not a gaming solution. All the software I installed, including Office and Photoshop, runs flawlessly and quickly, so I'm one very happy camper indeed. Without running the risk of sounding like a salesperson for Acer, there were tons of other great-looking deals on the deal sites, too. I just either missed my window of opportunity or my nerve about spending money.

The message here, folks, is that when trouble strikes and your ability to earn a living is thrown into question, the Internet and its users can come to your rescue and save you a bunch of cash. The best part was that my local supermarket beat out the likes of Best Buy or Dixons. And that's a winner for anyone who wants to stick it to the man.


[The Limey is written by Bryn Williams, who would have never considered Acer a brand worth owning until now. Shame about the graphics card though...]