Here are some cheap notebooks from Acer, thanks to their recent cashback program.

First of all, we have Acer Aspire 3682WXMI Notebook from OfficeWorks. Sorry no direct link because of the idiotic web interface of OfficeWorks, but you should be able to search for it. You pay $988 at the shop, and you get:

• Intel Celeron M 420 1.6Ghz
• 512Mb DDR2 RAM
• 80Gb HDD
• Dual layer DVD burner
• 14.1″ Widescreen LCD
• Wireless + Card reader
• Windows Vista Home Basic

Not the state of art machine, but should be powerful enough to run many productive applications, if you can manage to down grade to Windows XP (or get rid of Vista and install Ubuntu). Otherwise it would be nice to invest a bit more to get at least 1Gb of memory.

Moreover, there’s a $199 rebate before 31^st of March, which brings down the price to $789. Pretty good for an entry level lappy.

You can also pay $10 more, and get an Acer TravelMate 2483WXMI from Harris Technology. Seriously I cannot see any difference between these two models, at least from the specification, other than that TravelMate has a faster Celery processor at 1.73Ghz. They came from two different product line, as AFAIK TravelMate is for business and Aspire is for home/desktop replacement. So the TravelMate from Harris Technology might be a better deal — $799 after rebate, but the rebate closes at the end of February.

Another note is, we are seeing more and more cashback/mail-in rebates these days. Lots of HP products in the latest DSE and OfficeWorks catalogue are having mail-in rebates. Which it makes the products seem like a good bargain, I just don’t like this American way of marketing (especially when the turn-around time is usually 6-8 weeks). Give up some up-front saving please!

What do you think?