New Laptop
My old Toshiba laptop was starting to wear out (it had been doing double duty ever since the motherboard went out on my desktop machine.) The screen hinges were wore out requiring a hand to hold the screen up or something to prop it on. And the CD/DVD drive had given out long ago. I need a computer for school work, so I started looking around. I happened to check one of the Black Friday websites looking to see if there were going to be any deals on the day after Thanksgiving. I ran into an ad for a pre-Thanksgiving special with a Dell for $399. After customizing it somewhat, my total was around $670 (with free shipping.) As an added bonus, I could get it was XP instead of Vista. (Although the upgrade from XP Home to XP Pro itself added $100.)