Reviews of top deals posted this week.

dStore the Winner

dStore.com.au is the winner this week. Why? Because the top 2 deals submitted this week, $20 voucher with PayPal when spend $30 or more and free $10 voucher celebrating 8^th birthday, are both about dStore! Thanks to babytom and barguy for submitting these deals. Both of them are still valid so grab them if you can.

Return of BP-Citibank Credit Card Deal

IMHO the best reward credit card in Australia has now updated its BP-staff family and friends promotion. If you haven’t applied, go through the link and apply this card, and you’ll get:

• First year annual fee waived.
• $50 bonus credit.

That is on top of 5% cashback in BP petrol station and 1% cashback on all other purchases. That means, you do not need to spend a cent and you’ll get $50 to spend on a new credit card, and you can keep it for one year without paying annual fee. Citibank credit card application process can be a bit tedious because they do quite a bit of background check, but it is totally worth it. Check out my review last year.

Thanks to onetom2010 for posting the link.

Freebies and More Freebies

Everyone likes freebies.

• Sydney Tower Restaurant Bring a Friend Free — “Sign up to Sydney Tower Restaurant’s mailing list and then they will send you a voucher to bring a friend along for free to dine at the restaurant.”
• Free Wooden Spice Rack from Masterfoods — “If you buy 8 jars of Masterfoods spices and send the reciepts to Masterfoods they will send you a FREE wooden spice rack.”
• Free Johnson’s Baby Bedtime pack valued at $25 — “Every user to submit a post on any of the websites forum discussion groups will receive a Johnson’s Baby Bedtime pack valued at $25.”

Thanks to dfung, kagsmre and dansor.

I Want a Nintendo Wii!

I was very excited when I saw kcyw posted this deal — Free Wii Deal at Mo’s Mobiles. Basically you sign up a $19/month plan with Mo’s Mobiles (a 3 reseller) for 24 months (minimum spending $456), you’ll get:

• LG U300 phone with 2MP camera
• $19 worth of call credit each month
• Free Nintendo Wii

Yes. I need a new phone. My old Nokia 1100 no longer rings (only vibrates at incoming calls), and it has no colour screen, no bluetooth, no digital camera nor J2ME. I don’t make a lot of calls so $19/month is plenty…

Did I mention a free Nintendo Wii?!

However it appears that the promotion has already been running for a whole month. Wherever I called in Sydney told me that they no longer have stock. Mo’s Mobiles HQ told me to wait for the new promotion. Sounds like no Wii for me.

Wii is now selling for $348 at Kmart though, but I don’t think I’ll be able to get it. How sad. Consider Mo’s Mobiles deal was my only chance of getting a Wii as it was a home-CFO approved purchase :(

It has been a slow blogging week — sorry I have not written anything here for the paste week. Regular readers should know where all the new bargains are posted anyway. Personally I have also been spending more time running the OzBargain site than actual blogging here. I am a software developer after all and I actually enjoy coding and running a website more than bargain hunting (horror! horror!) So let me use this opportunity to update what has been happening there which I launched almost 11 months ago.

Traffic has been growing

IMG >> WORD * 1000 (A picture is worth a thousand words)

Looks like the traffic has been moving up each month since the start of the year. As of August, there were 58,000 visits and 180,000 page views. Not too bad for a website that is only 35MB on disk and used only 6GB traffic last month. Here are more interesting statistics:

• 91% of visitors are from Australia, which is obvious.
• 47.11% of visitors use Internet Explorer, and 46.32% use Firefox. It has been a close match, although there have been more Firefox users than IE users in all previous months.
• Firefox users spend on average 30 seconds more on OzBargain than Internet Explorer users.
• There have been 66 visits using Playstation 3, 4 visits using Nintendo Wii and 1 visits using Playstation Portable. Haven’t recorded anything against Xbox 360 yet. Oh, 1 visit using IRIX as well. Any Silicon Graphics deal out there? :)
• Most popular keyword people used on search engines to find OzBargain is… ozbargain! Looks like people are too lazy to type in the full URL or even bookmark the site, and prefer to just search for “ozbargain” on Google.
• Biggest referrer sites have been Whirlpool forums and OCAU forums, but I don’t even post there! Hey guys! Don’t spam those forums too hard :)

Thank you guys for supporting the growth of OzBargain!

We are still in BETA

Almost 11 months later and we are still in beta, as I am still constantly adding more features to OzBargain.com.au. The site might be a bit flaky every now and then so please excuse me and help me ironing out the bugs (while I am introducing more along the way :)

A few new features have been added over the past few weeks.

OzBargain Live was implemented for those who do not want to miss out any action happening at OzBargain. It is inspired by (read: idea stolen from) Digg Spy and Pligg Live but at a much slower pace. Basically it polls the server every minute looking for new deals and comments posted, and what have been voted, and by whom. It listed down all the “actions” in reverse chronological order.

If you are a developer, you can also grab the list of last 30 “actions” in JSON format here. You can use it to build more interesting tools for your own website or a desktop app. A super-mega bargain website mash up, or a OzBargain live action widget?

Top 150 OzBargain Tags is a tag cloud showing the weight of the tags proportional to their font size. What is a “tag”? It is a text string you can associate with a deal/coupon using a categorisation method called folksonomy. What is “Folksonomy”? According to Wikipedia:

Folksonomy (also known as collaborative tagging , social classification, social indexing, social tagging, and other names) is the practise and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize Content. In contrast to traditional subject indexing metadata is not only generated by experts but also by creators and consumers of the content. Usually freely chosen keywords are used instead of a controlled vocabulary.

Make sense? No? Actually in the context of social classification, it only really works if there is a large number of participants tagging the same resource, which is not what OzBargain does (only the content creator, i.e. the one who posted the deal, can tag). However I think tagging is just something that you ought to have in the Web 2.0 era (see this Dilbert cartoon), provided that you can define what “Web 2.0” is :)

Deals/coupons by merchant’s URL domain is also a new feature that has been added over the last couple of weeks. It is actually an easier way to see all the offers from a particular merchant, assumes that they all have the same domain in URL (that’s why I am quite particular about putting in the right URL when you submit a deal).

Formation of URL is simple:

http://www.ozbargain.com.au/deals/<domain>

For example, if you want to check all the deals submitted to OzBargain that are related to Deals Direct, you use the following URL:

http://www.ozbargain.com.au/deals/dealsdirect.com.au

Simple, huh?! Now it is easy to find out deals offered by OO.com.au, Dell, dStore and ShoppingSquare. Go ahead and try the rest.

You can also append /feed at the end of merchant domain URL and it instantly becomes an RSS feed. Tracking Dell deals with FeedDaemon? No problem!

There are other tweaks here and there which I can’t remember, but the fact is, OzBargain is probably going to stay in Beta for a while. I have also been experimenting an alternate method to access the deals posted at OzBargain — and hopefully I’ll reveal it next week. Stay tuned!

Bad thing about having a contact form

The easiest way to contact me is use the Contact Form here (or at OzBargain). What those forms do is simply sending an email to me. Now I have all kinds of people contacting me this way. Some are very helpful — thank you to everyone who notified me about bugs. Some are spammy, which I won’t disclose the content here. Some are just plain silly.

Every week someone will use the contact form to ask me about the “products” that I am offering. Oh wait, I am not running a merchant website here — I am running a social bargain website and I do not physically sell anything! However it seems that people don’t really get the idea. They put in the product name into Google. Somehow they found OzBargain or this blog. Then they will use the contact form to ask:

• “Can you tell me how much does it cost to connect to your VoIP service?”
• “My camera broke and can you tell me how much does it cost to repair it, and where I can send it to?”
• “I am interested in your product. Please call me on this number <an Australian mobile number<“
• “…”

I was trying to explain the situation for the first few enquiries, but after a while I just can’t be bothered. Any suggestion on stopping people making silly enquiries?

Wow! The 6th generation iPod is out! Classic now has more capacity at the same price, Nano gets fatter with video capability, Shuffle is almost unchanged, and welcome to the new member of the family — iPod Touch!

No, they are not cheap — an iPod Touch 8GB with touch screen and Wi-Fi will leave you $419 poorer. That probably also means, you can pick up an older generation of iPods at bargain basement price!

4^th Gen iPod 40GB for $179

Thanks to stonedewok, who posted this refurb 4^th generation iPod 40GB for $179, delivery included! Now, 40GB is a lot of space for your music and video and files. Although it is now 2 generation behind so you won’t look that hip when you pull it out from the pocket, but I don’t think you can find anything else comparable on the market.

Free Download Command & Conquer Gold

Any RTS fan out there?! Well I’ll count myself out as I am usually too slow playing anything RT and I much prefer turn-based games :) However I still went and got the Command & Conquer Gold, because it is free!

It has been 12 years since the original C&C came out, and to celebrate it, they have made the game free to download! Personally I do not mind playing old games and I do hope that more developers are willing to release those old classics for free.

Oh wait — they have! Ubisoft has released 3 classic games for free — Far Cry (2004), Prince of Persia (2003) and Rayman Raving Rabbids (2006). Not as classic as C&C, but they are also far more recent. Thanks to Duke for posting it.

$3.95 Pizza from Domino’s

Cheapest way to celebrate the Father’s Day? No, not Men’s Perfumes as they have zero perceived value from me. $3.95 pizza from the Domino’s? Yup that’s better :) Thanks to young_dazza for posting this deal.

Unfortunately the code has already expired. The good news is, this code still works, which also gives you $3.95 large pizza pick up.

$10 Off for Every $100 Spent at Myer

Are you a Myer Card holder? Then you can get $10 off for every $100 spent at Myer until 8 September 2007! Make sure you check what is included/excluded from the transaction. Thanks to barguy for posting it.

Don’t have Myer Card? Apply here — you’ll also get $20 voucher with the card and no annual fee.

That’s it for this week — for more bargains, subscribe to OzBargain. Have a bargain to share? Post it at OzBargain, and you will have a chance to win a $20 voucher each week!

Big thanks to both dStore and ShoppingSquare for providing exclusive deals at OzBargain. It is great to see merchants coming onboard and passing on savings to consumers.

dStore $10 Off Any Order Over $30

dStore posted an exclusive deal last week, where via a special landing page you can get $10 off any order over $30, before end of this month. We had quite a few dStore deals before, but this one at maximum 33% off is the best I have seen so far.

You just need to follow onto the special promotion page, sign in with your existing dStore account (or create a new account if you do not yet have one), and dStore will credit $10 into your account when you make a purchase that is $30 or more. Here are the terms and conditions:

• Vouchers cannot be used in conjunction with any other offer.
• Vouchers is not transferable and cannot be redeemed for cash.
• Voucher cannot be used to purchase Gift Vouchers or Gift Certificates.
• One voucher per household.
• Voucher Expires at midnight 30/09/2007.

Free Delivery for Digital Cameras from ShoppingSquare

Danilo from ShoppingSquare has provided OzBargain readers another exclusive deal — Free Delivery for Digital Cameras, also expirng at the end of this month.

According to Shopbot, ShoppingSquare has already provided best price in many digital camera models, and free delivery will save the shoppers $18 which is their usual delivery cost for cameras.

For example from the page Danilo linked to:

• Canon A560 for $219.95 (Shopbot price comparison)
• Canon A570 IS $289.95 (Shopbot price comparison)
• Canon Powershot S5 $535.95 (Shopbot price comparison)
• FujiFilm FinePix S6500fd $399.95 (Shopbot price comparison)

And much much more. I am not sure how the ShoppingSquare did it — having many best price yet still providing discount, but I guess it would be one very good month to buy a digital camera.

OO.com.au is currently running free delivery, this weekend only!

The same deal — you must pay using PayPal, and this offer ends at 5pm Sunday 2 September 2007, i.e. in less than 24 hours. Thanks to barguy for spotting this and posted on OzBargain.

This week has been a hectic week at OzBargain where over 50 deals have been posted by its members. We are also getting 2,000+ visitors and 8,000+ page views a day, thanks to a ton of traffic from Google. It has also been a hectic week for me though as I have only managed to post 2 out of the 50+ deals posted.

Hopefully I will have more time doing more bargain hunting this coming week. Let’s just look at what have been posted this week.

Free Movie Rental from Block Buster

Thanks to Pyro for posting this deal, where you can New Release movie rental for free from Block Buster. All you need to do is

• Go to Block Buster’s home page.
• Wait until Free Movie Rental ads appear
• Click through and complete the survey
• You will get the voucher at the end

Each voucher enables you to rent one new release movie for free. Oh scrap that, you can just go directly to download the voucher, thanks to dansor for posting the link.

$40 iTunes Cards for $30 at AustPost

Australia Post would probably be the last place you’ll expect to find a bargain. However over the past decade AustPost has diversified and started to become your local gift shop, and occasionally bargains can be found. Thanks to filtercore for telling us about this great iTunes music card deal, where $40 worth of digital music can be bought for $30!

Wait until ARIA complains “this iTunes deal has costed us million dollars CD sale!!” :)

Alternatively you can buy 1 BigPond Music Prepaid Card and get 1 free, if you prefer WMA than AAC. Thanks to Buzz for sharing this deal.

Subway Fresh Fit Meal Give Away

I actually have to look up on this one (it might be on TV ads but I never watch TV). What is Subway Fresh Fit?

SUBWAY FRESH FIT™ Meals and SUBWAY FRESH FIT FOR KIDS™ Meals were developed to help adults and kids meet the Dieticians Associated of Australia diet recommendations.

They are currently running a promotion, thanks to barguy who posted about it, that you can get either drink bottle or MP3 holder for free when you buy a Fresh Fit meal. Yum!

(Note — unfortunately you still need to move yourself away from the computer and do some exercise to get fit)

Free 6×4″ Photos from FujiColor

More free photo prints — and this time it is FujiColor giving away 20 free 6×4 prints, or $5-equivalent credit, when you sign up an account. Thanks to dansor for posting this.

Personally I actually quite like FujiColor’s prints. I have been printing $15 worth of photos from Harvey Norman’s Photo Centre this week, who uses FujiColor’s printers. 6×4″ prints are on special at the moment for 15 cents each.

$125 Gift Voucher from Rivers

Thanks to winter who posted this great deal, where you can get $125 gift voucher from Rivers by spending $125 at Rivers Australia before 5^th of September. Check out their catalogue for more details.

That is pretty much a 50% off deal — spend $125 and you effectively get $250 worth of goods.

10% Off Yogee.com.au Store Wide

Thanks to Yogee who has provided us another great coupon this week — 10% off store wide! Yogee.com.au has been a regular contributor at OzBargain.com.au, and has given us many exclusive deals.

Well well. There are simply too many deals posted this week. If you don’t to miss out any new bargain, check out the subscription options at OzBargain.com.au.

Scott’s History of Computer Monitors

1995

Bought my very first computer when I moved out home. Paid $300 for a 14″ KTX CRT, and thought it was a pretty good price.

1998

Spent $950 on a 19″ CTX CRT that did 1600×1200 @ 75Hz, after shopped around for a long time. It was heavy, and the screen was not flat, but I had great time playing Quake 3 Arena finishing my thesis on it.

2000

Got a new job, who bought me a 15″ LCD monitor (for around $800 I think). It was flat, and it did not flicker. I was happy coding on that until I changed to another job…

2005

Bought a Dell UltraSharp 1905FP for half price due to a special deal we had with Dell. At $350 a pop it was a steal (someone in the office bought 9). And this thing was huge and had very good contrast for an LCD.

2006

It turns out that almost everyone at work has 2 Dell 1905FP/1907FP on the desk, because these 19 inchers were so cheap. They also don’t feel as big as they used to be…

Fast Forward to August 2007…

So what was my point? When I saw how much these new 24″ Acer LCD monitors are sold for at ShoppingSquare, I was shocked how much price has come down. The screen gets bigger and bigger, yet the price just drops lower and lower!

Here we have Acer AL2416WD 24″ LCD Monitor, where the slogan is “Everything is bigger and better on the Acer AL2416WD”. Yes, 24 inch running at 1920×1200 is very useful if you are doing any programming work that requires your text editor, runtime debugger, log console, reference manual and Slashdot opening all at the same time! The most famous 24 incher previously has been Dell’s UltraSharp 2407WFP, which is quite a state-of-art machine. However at $1,000+ it sides with the term “luxury” more than “necessity”.

Now, how much would an equivalent spec’ed Acer 24″ LCD monitor cost?

$800? $700? From ShoppingSquare’s newsletter I’ve learnt that it has dropped below $600 (price comparison from ShopBot)! You get:

• Max Resolution: 1920×1200
• Brightness: 500cd/m2
• Dot Pitch: 0.27mm
• Contrast Ratio: 1000:1
• Response Time: 6ms
• Input: D-Sub + DVI-D (with HDCP support)

Apparently Acer AL2416WD is not the only 24″ LCD monitor that dropped below $600. AOC 416V is another cheap 24 inch that you can buy in that price range (price comparison from ShopBot). The panel is not as good as Acer’s on paper — 160 degree viewing angel (Acer: 178 degree), 300 cd/m² brightness (Acer: 500 cd/m²), etc, but has a faster response time (5ms vs. Dell @ 6ms).

I guess the reason for its faster response time but a poor viewing angel is — it is a TN + film panel, which only has 18 bit colour (65k) instead of 24 bit (16m). That not it is going to be a show stopper if you are working on word processor or text editors most of the time. However for those who are picky about gradient shades in their latest BluRay disc, it is a compromise that should not be made.

So, is 24″ the best monitors to buy now? 27 inch, with the same resolution as the 24 inch but slightly bigger in geometry, has also come down in price. Maybe I should wait for that instead?

One thing for sure though. They will be bigger and cheaper next year.

Okay. The decision is, my not-so-regular weekly bargain reviews are now moved from Sunday to Thursday. Why Thurday? Because I was too tired on Sunday so I did not bother to… Wait, the real reason is, I am trying to line up my blog entries after our weekly competitions at OzBargain, so that new entries do not get extra coverage to give them advantage for the next week’s competition.

Now, what deals have been posted over the last few days?

The winner for this week’s competition is Free “Raising Children” DVD courtesy of the Australian Government, thanks to barguy who posted it on Monday. I am trying to work out the ingrident of winning the contest, and they seem to be:

• It is FREE (actually tax payers’ money but that’s beside the point).
• Russell Crowe and other celebraties are giving advise on it.
• “17 ways to encourage good behaviour” hmmm, with a 3-year-old at home, I know I need it!

Next down the popularity list is $1 Standard delivery @ dStore, plus another 8% moneyback from MoneyBackCo, thanks to dansor for posting this. Unfortunately the deal has already expired. There is also $15 credit when you spend $75 or more at dStore with PayPal. I am actually not that keen on dStore because personally I found them a bit more expensive than other shops (they are heavy on advertising as an evidence).

We have talked about cheap Dell, cheap Lenovo and cheap Apple before. Now what about a free Compaq Presario + training courses?! Thanks to our government’s Skills for the Future program, anyone enrolled can receive a free laptop and one work-skill training course, to equip yourself to be part of future Knowledge Nation. Except it is only available for those who have never completed Year 12 or TAFE — so I guess many who already have computer skills are excluded. Not really a bargain available to all, but a great program from the government nevertheless. Thanks to kcyw for posting this.

Thanks to Shan for sharing a JB Hi-Fi Family and Friends deal. Branch at Chadstone Victoria is moving, and sounds like they want to minimise the amount paid to removalists by giving big discount to staffs’ family and friends! Unfortunately, (1) it is only useful if you are in Melbourne, and (2) it has come and gone, as the sale was on Wednesday.

Our friends at Deals Direct have run not just one free delivery this week, but TWO! Thanks to dansor who posted Deals Direct’s free postage coupon for the Father’s Day, you can now get free postage all the way until 3^rd of September! In fact there have been quite a few Father’s Day-related PayPal offers at PayPal-offers.com.au — be sure to check them out!

Finally. Free samples — some people might think it is a bargain, but others think not. They are used by manufacturers to test market response, or by marketers to fish your name and contact details. Either way, you get something for nothing, and we have got lots of those freebie posts this week.

• Collgate Free Total Professional Sample — good size toothpaste to bring on the trip. Thanks to DJS.
• Free Chicken Feet Slippers when you buy 4 jars of Chicken Tonight. Thanks to undiesdownunder.
• Free PC Games & Recieve 50% Off Mystery Case Files. Thanks to JeffreyM.
• Free Sample of Sunsilk Deeply Brunette Shampoo and Conditioner. Thanks to dansor (again).

And more…

Have a good week!

I am a Dell man. There are currently 4 Dells at home — two notebooks, one desktop and also my trusty Dell Axim v50 PDA (although only one notebook is out of my own pocket). I have been a happy Dell user since 1999 and rarely have any issue with those made-in-Malaysia grey/black boxes.

But many of my friends would not agree.

There is a group of people who swear by IBM ThinkPads as much as I love my Dell Latitude. They are famous for their design and durability, and as one of my friends has described, “ThinkPad is just better.” Taken over by Lenovo does not seem to make a difference on its reputation. So at the end it is difficult to convince them about the great savings they can get by buying Dell.

Not any more.

MoneyBackCo Now Offers 5% MoneyBack on Lenovo Products

Yes that is right! Steve placed an announcement on OzBargain, that now you can get 5% moneyback when you buy Lenovo online! That should be enough to shut up those Lenovo lovers :)

There is also currently a Lenovo promotion on ThinkPad going on at the moment.

• Pre-order ThinkPad T60 for $1,999 (OzBargain entry here), and you get a Core 2 Duo notebook with 15.4″ LCD, 2GB RAM, 160GB Hard Drive, DVD Writer, Vista Home Premium and an external 19″ LCD monitor.
• Purchase selected T61 or X61 and you can get either Audio Technica noise cancelling headset or Lenovo 160GB external hard drive for free.

Now MoneyBackCo has got Lenovo (5%), Apple (3%) and Dell (3%) on board, who else do you need? Note that you can still get moneyback buying HP/Compaq or Toshiba, but through resellers such as Harris Technology, where you can get 4.5% moneyback from MBC as well.

I know these “online bargain retailers” all send out their newsletters during the wee hours of the morning, when everyone else is deep in sleep. I know sending the newsletter to subscribers can be automated, so they do not necessarily need to be up to dispatch them. However they do need to be awake to post a related deal at OzBargain!

This is exactly what Deals Direct has done. A few minutes ago they have just posted their latest deal, Free Postage on All Product if you pay using PayPal. That is 12:16am on Sunday morning! You guys worked too hard!

From the newsletter it reads:

Free Shipping Bonanza! Don’t Miss Out. No Extensions!

The clever bargain hunter always check out newsletter for new bargains, and today we’ve got an exclusive offer to further reward you for your efforts! We’re offering free shipping on all orders paid via PayPal. This offer is only valid for orders paid via PayPal and will finish on Monday at 11am AEST. So if you’ve never used PayPal before this is your ideal chance to make your purchases safer and easier while reaping the rewards of our tremendous offer! It’s safe and easy – just select PayPal as your payment option during checkout and we’ll guide you through the rest.

Expires 11AM 20 August — less than 35 hours! No wonder they want as many people know about it as possible. Want to save on delivery? Better be hurry.

CarAdvice: Fuel Shopper Dockets Under Fire.

The ironic part of the system is that many motorists tend to spend more than they have to get the fuel-saving docket, and then travel past their local petrol station to fill up at a station which honours their docket. This usually results in more money being spent for a minuscule saving.

So true. We have covered fuel shopper dockets many times here at Oz Bargain Blog and at OzBargain.com.au. Every now and then you will get big mega retailers offering crazy deals that give you up to 20 cents a litre off, but usually with a catch written in tiny fonts attached to the footnotes. Personally I do not think the fuel dockets are on the way out though, as they are actually working as intended.

They were intended to build brand loyalty and bring more revenue to those mega retailers. In a greater or lesser degree, they have succeed with what they aimed to achieve, but not necessarily provide consumers any real saving at the end.

I for one do not bother to collect fuel dockets anymore. We do our grocery in Aldi these days, which is marginally cheaper than Coles and Woolies. I pump up my car mostly at BP because of the 5% cashback from the BP-Citibank Mastercard, although we usually have excessive Coles/Woolies fuel dockets from our non-driving friends. Most importantly, we just do not drive that much to warrant the effort to collect these dockets ourselves. 4 cents a litre only gives me maximum $2 saving for my old Nissan Pulsar (50 litre tank) — and that is every 3 weeks as that’s how frequent (or infrequent) we fill up the tank. $2 can be easily save by shopping at Aldi instead of Coles for 3 weeks…

Do you still collect fuel dockets? Do you think it is worth the effort?

One of the most frustrating thing about bargain hunting is, the real deal only comes AFTER you made the purchase. You bought an item at a price that you believe is pretty good. Two days later, there comes further discount. D’oh. That is how I feel at the moment.

Last week I wrote about buying a new Dell Inspiron 1420 to replace my wife’s dead iBook. Wednesday morning it came the delivery man with our brand new Dell in a sealed box. How exciting! Our very first Windows Vista computer! Moreover I bought it through MoneyBackCo so hopefully I am grabbing a good bargain with the moneyback.

Wrong.

corona posted the latest Dell coupons on OzBargain this afternoon with 5-10% off discount on Dell Inspiron an Vostro notebooks and desktops, Latitude notebooks and Optiplex desktops! Offer is valid until end of this month, and we have:

I have just tested the coupon against the system I bought, and it worked. Massive discount! I could have saved $$$ if I buy a few days later!

I think I just need to realise that once you bought, never look back! It is only going to be cheaper — at least for the computers and electronic gadgets. Still, for those who was patient and waited, here is your chance to get good discount directly from Dell.

It is that time of the month again — Catch A Thon #8 is coming to Daily Deals today! For those who are not familiar with Daily Deals’ Catch A Thon, it is the day of the month where many cheap 1-day items from Catch of the Day get sold again, all at the same time. See the description at CotD:

Around the middle of every month for 24 hours only we offer up hundreds of past popular catch’s on our sister site www.dailydeals.com.au. The actual day is advertised on the site a few days before launch.

“Middle of the Month” means —

Well. You can now pretty much figuring out when Catchathon #9 is coming out. Regularity is a good thing.

It will kick start in 45 minutes. I will update this entry with some interesting items in this month’s Catchathon. (Note: Don’t forget that our weekly OzBargain competition ends in 45 minutes as well!)

Update 12:17pm: Not good. Currently I am getting:

Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Too many connections in /home/admin/public_html/includes/functions/database.php on line 19
Unable to connect to database server!

Looks like they are having a very popular start!

Best deals that have been posted on OzBargain this week.

Free Dishwasher Tablet

Community voting works in mysterious ways. ozpete posted this deal on 6 free Moring Fresh dishwash tab, and got voted to the most popular deal this week, although he admitted that it is not as good as his previous deal. Anyway. Fill up the form, and they will send you 6 tablets enough for your weekly washing.

I also voted before I realised that I actually do not have a diskwasher at home.

15% Off Toys at Yogee.com.au

Thanks to Chang from Yogee.com.au who offered 15% off all toys exclusive deal. Use coupon code e4770a at checkout to receive your discount. You’ll get a further 6% discount from MoneyBackCo. There is a huge category to check out.

More Happening at MoneyBackCo

Steve from MoneyBackCo has been working hard to bring on more moneyback deals onto the table.

• $55 moneyback with Vodafone’s $49 Maxi Cap plan
• 6% moneyback from Budget Car Rental
• 55 more merchants added to moneyback list

One of my favourite MoneyBackCo merchant is Seek Books. They are amongst the cheapest, relatively cheap delivery (last time I got free delivery with PayPal), and 10.5% moneyback! Great place to shop for books if you do not wish for wait for overseas delivery from Amazon.

Dell 30″ UltraSharp LCD $1,599

While Dell has been dropping the price of its low-end (19″ and 20″) monitors like crazy — $249 for a 19″ widescreen LCD, and $329 for a 20″ widescreen LCD, both including delivery charge. This time Dell is dropping the price of its top-of-the-range LCD monitor, the Dell UltraSharp 3007WFP-HC with resolution like 2560×1600 — to $1,599 delivered.

Unfortunately it only takes DVI-D dual link connector so you not only need to upgrade your monitor, you also need to upgrade your video card. In order to fully utilise your new screen estate, you might as well upgrade the entire system so it can run more things concurrently. Don’t forget about MoneyBackCo 3% moneyback on Dell products.

More deals next week!

You know. Sometimes !@#$ happens to websites which causes them to go offline. Some websites are hosted on crappy oversold servers that go down a few times a day, and some are hosted on geographically isolated clusters that guarantee availability. Achieving the four nine’s — 99.99% availability — can be very costly, so the question ought to be asked is, how much does downtime cost a website?

For OzBargainBlog, it worked out to be around 35 cents per hour of lost opportunity to bombard visitors with more advert banners (yes I know it is pathetic). For a large online retailer, it can be a massive lost of business opportunity that costs tens or hundreds thousands dollars. Worse, 9 out 10 consumers will go to the competitors if your website is down so you loose the returning purchases as well!

No wonder Deals Direct, one of the top online retailer in Australia, is so eager to have their websites fixed as it went offline on Wednesday, that they are giving away a 8% discount coupon and adding more discount each hour their site is down, taken from their IT Team’s pay packets.

Fortunately (or unfortunately?) Deals Direct’s site came back online at around 8:30pm so the maximum discount is only 8%. Use the following code when you shop at Deals Direct to claim your discount, funded by the poor engineers in the server room.

8PERCENT

Now, whether the website is really offline, or whether it is just their latest buzz-making strategy — I have no idea. However I doubt you can really deduct wages from your employee’s pay packet this way (but I could be very wrong). Anyway, what really matter is that there is a new Deals Direct discount coupon, valid until 10 August 2007.

By the way, I only found out about the deal at around 9pm and the site was already back online. I wonder why there was not anyone contacting their Russian mafia friends to perform some distributed Denial of Service attack on the website to make sure that it stays down until 12. Just kidding :)