Both Koorong and Word are having 20% off store-wide sale this weekend.

From Koorong:

It doesn’t get bigger than this: save 20% off everything in stock during Koorong’s five-day sale!

From Thursday 22nd February to Monday 26th February (web store open on Sunday 25th), save 20% off all our books, Bibles, CDs, DVDs -– everything in stock.

Do note that the sale applies to everything that is in stock. No raincheck here. OzBargain post here.

As of WORD:

20% Off Web Sale: Sale from Friday 23 February to Midnight Monday 26 February

Discount is also available instore.

I figured that they usually run store-wide sale together (like last time for example). Thanks to this thing called “competition” :) Also for both stores, you can get free delivery for orders $100 or more.

Just in time when we need to buy some books :)

Thanks to geforcemmx for posting this. Dick Smith Electronics is selling the Toshiba Satellite A100/Y03 notebook for $892. Not a bad notebook computer from its spec, and it definitely has a better processor than the Acers I posted a few days ago.

• Intel Core Solo T1350 1.88Ghz
• 512Mb DDR2 RAM
• 40Gb Hard Disk Drive
• CD-RW/DVD Combo Drive
• 15.4″ Widescreen LCD
• Card Reader
• Wireless 802.11a/b/g
• Firewire/IEEE 1394 port
• Windows XP Home
• 1 Year International Warranty

Toshiba is currently running a $100 mail-in rebate, which brings down the price to $792. Moreover, according to what geforcemmx has posted in OzBargain, DSE in Sydney CBD York Street has its price marked down by $115 — making the final price $677 after the rebate. Not sure whether other DSE/DSE PowerHouse is marking down their price, but maybe you can point them to the catalogue posted in OzBargain.

That is cheap for a good budget notebook. I also had very good experience with Toshiba Satellites, as they are very solid (though bulky).

I thought it was cheap when I saw it two weeks ago, and it has just gone cheaper! Check this out from OO.com.au — 106cm / 42in Plasma High-Definition TV for $1,199.95 + delivery, offer ends this Saturday.

I guess the raise of LCD TVs has really pushed down the price of these big plasma TVs. The brand is “Nu-Tec” which is probably generic. The spec is quite good, i.e. a 1080i-compatible screen at this price point.

• 106cm/42in plasma TV with HDMI
• Resolution: 1280×768
• Contrast: 10000:1
• Brightness: 1500 cd/m²
• Input: HDMI / SCART / YPbPr / S-Video / VGA / RF
• 12 month warranty

Or maybe this Hyundai 66cm (26in) LCD TV that has been discounted to $799.95 + delivery. Smaller, lighter and cheaper than the bigger plasma, but with the same resolution that’s 720p/1080i compatible.

My old host, Jumba, has launched some new services today, including their new domain reselling business. While I don’t appreciate them mocking the nerds in their front-page, I do like their prices — $24.95 for .com.au/.net.au/.id.au domains for 2 years.

That is the cheapest as far as I know. Certainly cheaper than everyone on the domain name price comparison website, and under-cut NetRegistry’s Hostess by a whopping 5 cents.

Not sure how Jumba can make the price that low. Especially when they are using AussieHQ as registrar, whose price is way more expensive than Jumba’s. With my previous experience with them, at least I know who I will go with my next .au domain purchase.

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?

Thanks to Felix who sent me these Civic Video vouchers. You need to print them out, and they will expire on 28 February so you still have a bit more than a week to use them.

	New Release Movie Hires — $1.95
	New Release Movie Hires — $1 each
	New Release Movie Hires — $1 Mon-Thur $1.95 Fri-Sun
	New Release Movie Hires — $1.95

Not sure why it comes with so many varieties as the 2nd one is clearly the best deal ($1 new release hire). They have different restrictions though.

TWOdollars.com.au has a special promotion this weekend — 10% off all orders over $80. Promotion ends Monday, 19 Feb at 9am.

They seem to be running this every month or two. My only complain is, it is extra difficult to spend over $80 in a dollar shop.

I have been a PayPal user for many years, but I have only recently started receiving money in my PayPal account. Funds that I have received were in two different currencies — Australian Dollar and US Dollar.

Using up Aussie dollar in my PayPal account is easy. Many online shops would let you pay in PayPal (Deals Direct, OO.com.au and SoldSmart for example), and the competitions at OzBargain are mostly funded by the AUD I have in my PayPal account.

Using up my US dollar portion part of the fund is another matter. First of all, I rarely buy things from the States. Maybe I should, as things are usually far cheaper than the rip off price we pay here, even including delivery. Moreover, while PayPal is even more acceptable there, it was surprisingly (or not so surprisingly) not supported by one store that I visit occasionally — Amazon. Neither is my hosting company supporting PayPal, so that I have to pay them using my Australian credit card.

That’s the main problem, you see. I have USD in PayPal — but I cannot buy things in my preferred US shop. I do not want to transfer USD in PayPal into AUD in my Australian bank account, and then pay those US goods and services using my Australian credit card either. I would have to pay the currency transfer fee twice in this case.

I was happy to find out that PayPal has a MasterCard debit card which allows you to use your PayPal fund everywhere MasterCard is accepted! That means I can buy from Amazon and pay my hosting bills using USD in my PayPal fund! “Signing up is easy… click Continue to get started.” So inviting! That’s exactly what I need.

Until the sign up process barking at me, saying that the country I have entered is Invalid. Its user agreement says:

The PayPal ATM/Debit Card is available only to US members with an address in the 50 states, and select Canadian users.

D’oh. Looks like I am living in the wrong place.

Anyone got any suggestion on how I can spend USD in my PayPal account with the least overhead?

I have just announced this week’s winners of our weekly OzBargain competition. It turns out both of them about cheap flights.

neil from Melbourne posted about the Jetstar 2 for 1 Valentine’s Day Sale:

Jetstar just kicked off a Valentine’s Day promotion for 2 for 1 tickets. Must buy by Feb 14th (midday). Fly between March/April — September.

I guess it does not apply now, as Valentine’s Day has already passed. Anyone grabbed the special ticket from Jetstar yesterday? (If they managed to grab one while the website is up).

And the “lucky winner” of the random draw is JeffreyM, who posted about Virgin Blue’s Happy Hour:

Every day between 12pm & 1pm — Virgin Blue has a Happy Hour where they got bargain airfares — one time they even had $1 tickets.

Yup. It’s the flight ticket lottery, but the deal is still on. Who said the price war on airfare has all finished?

The competition continues next week, and I’ll give out another $40 on 22^nd of February (yup, post-Chinese New Year red packet from OzBargain). Send your deals in!

Also Gravatar is back online again! Both OzBargain and OzBargain Blog use Gravatar to provide avatar next to your comments. So if you don’t like the big question mark next to the deals you have posted, go and upload your picture there.

Just in case you have missed, OzBargain is going to run regular competitions every week. Our last two runs had great results, and I am hoping to have something similar running every week. Let’s make it a habit :)

So from now on, every Thursday at 12:00pm mid-day, I will draw two winners from those who submitted deals over the previous 7 days. The deal that receives most votes will get $20 gift voucher, and I will draw another winner from all submitters for another $20 gift voucher.

The first draw will be next Thursday (15 Feb). Any question? Ask them here, or post them in the OzBargain forums. Now, get active and send us some bargains :)

Thanks to Buckscoop for spotting this great deal!

From the most recent Dell newsletter, they are running a special deal on Dimension E520 Intel Core 2 Duo desktop computers. They are advertising a “PowerPack”, where for $1,549 you will get:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 (1.83Ghz)
• 512Mb DDR2 RAM
• 160Gb SATA Hard Disk
• 22″ Widescreen LCD Monitor
• 16x DVD Writer
• Windows Vista Home Basic
• 2 Year Onsite Warranty

The “E-Value code” is Q240213. Except for the fact the Windows Vista will struggle with just 512Mb of RAM. The newsletter was sent 3 days ago.

However, this deal is no longer available (which is typical for Dell). Instead, the same E-Value code has been replaced with a deal that is $200 more expensive, but with 24″ Ultrasharp 2407WFP instead! So now for $1,749, you will get these instead:

• Upgrade to 24″ Ultrasharp 2407WFP
• Upgrade to 250Gb SATA Hard Disk
• Bonus Dell 725 Printer

Very nice! Consider the entry level 22 inch LCD is $599, whereas 24 inch Ultrasharp is on special at $1,099 online. So $200 gets you $500 worth of monitor upgrade + bigger hard disk + bonus printer. Not bad.

When you actually go in and configure your new Dimension E520, you will get another option to upgrade to 27″ Ultrasharp for only $276.10. Hey! Last time I checked, Dell 27″ 2707WFP Ultrasharp costs $1,999. So that’s a $900 monitor upgrade for $276.10, which brings the total price to $2,025.10.

Then you can use the following coupon code:

39103C3DA38C

Which takes $150 off the final price, which is now $1,860.10. Even cheaper than buying 2707WFP! This deal ends 15 February 2007. I hope Dell Australia will not try to correct the “typo” before the promotion ends.

How to make it even cheaper? You can buy it via Buckscoop, which offers you 0.75% cashback on Dell computers (that’s $13.95). Combine that with a credit card that can give you 1% cashback (for example the BP-Citibank MasterCard). You can also remove the “bonus printer” which will deduct $11 from the final price (you shouldn’t buy printers worth $11 anyway). But don’t forget to get more memory to keep Windows Vista happy.

yingtzee asked on OzBargain:

Where do you find all these bargains??

I assume that it is about the cheap clearance item, a Canon IXUS 750 specifically, from Harris Technology. I have actually been buying from HT for yonks, before it became part of the Coles Group. However it has never had an image of cheap no-frills shop, and in general I found them quite a bit more expensive than your average online computer shops in this highly competitive market.

Except the clearance items. Like all big retailers who can be really keen in getting rid of their older stocks, you can expect big savings from those slightly out-dated items. Think how many regular promotions and sales Kmart, Target and Big W are having these days.

However in technology-term, an “out-dated” item might only be 4-6 months old! So if you don’t really need the absolutely latest bleeding edge stuff, you can get good quality gadget with great service and warranty from big retailers like Harris Technology.

Okay. Now, where do I find these cheap bargains on HT? A few ways.

Clearance Category

Harris Technology makes it easy for you. Here you go, the Clearance category of their online shop. There are lots of items listed there that are marked down from their RRP (probably because they are older stocks), ranging from computers, printers, camera, software, etc.

However, be sure to also check the price against price comparison sites. A clearance item might not always be the best bargain, so it is a good idea to use a good price comparison sites to find out whether it is indeed a good deal. I recommend StaticICE for computer parts and gadgets.

For example, Canon IXUS 55 (5MP, 3xZoom) for $329 is cheap, but Canon IXUS 65 (6MP, 3″ LCD) for $499 is stupidly expensive, despite the “clearance” label there.

Sometimes HT’s clearance items can be just a few dollars dealer, but then you have to calculate in the cost of delivery and the level of service.

Clearance RSS Feeds

Yes! They have got it right, by including products in their RSS feeds. Probably not as a result of my preaching, but we shall hopefully see more and more online stores incorporating RSS links to feed the hungry bargain hunters.

They have two clearance related feeds at the moment:

• Products on special
• Clearance products

Just add them into your RSS reader, and you will be notified whenever something is on sale at HT.

Subscribe to Newsletter

The deal I saw on the Canon IXUS 750 actually came from HT’s email newsletter, and it wasn’t even listed under the clearance category. You must have an account there in order to access their subscription facility, where you can subscribe to their deals and specials.

I know most people don’t like those opt-in spams newsletters, and the reason I have subscribed to so many of them is so that I can then filter out the junks and blog about the rest here. It is a good idea to get a dedicated email account for this kind of tasks, so your personal or work email address might be spared from the “newsletter flood”.

Subscribe to OzBargain Blog

Alright. It has nothing to do with Harris Technology, but I would like to announce a new’ish feature here, where you can subscribe to this blog via email. Don’t use RSS? Or have no idea what it is? You can now have new articles here posted to you at most once a day.

Use the email subscription box at the right hand side of this page, and all I need to know is your email address. Thanks to FeedBurner for providing this service.

For the next 24 hours, Catch of the Day will put 60 past daily sale items on Daily Deals at low low price. They will only be there for 1 day only, or until stock runs out, similar to what they had over 1 and half months ago.

Moreover, if you buy 4 items, you’ll get a free beach tower. 5 items or more you’ll get a free pasta maker.

Lots of good deals around, but I won’t list them here — go and check them out!

I have just had a chance to test drive MoneyBackCo, who tagged themselves as “Australia’s Moneyback Community”. It is basically a “cashback” site, where they give you back the commissions from the affiliation sales, just like Buckscoop and OzRewardS which I have previously reviewed (as well as the biggest in Australia, EmailCash, which I haven’t written about).

However, what sets MoneyBackCo apart is, instead of taking a chunk of commission and giving back to you the rest (50% in the case of Buckscoop and a bit less in the case of OzRewardS, depending on the merchant), their business strategy is actually giving back 100% of the commission to their users! For example, if you are getting this Palm Tungsten E2 for $279 from Deals Direct, you’ll get back

• $13.95 from MoneyBackCo (5%)
• $6.98 from Buckscoop (2.5%)
• $5.58 from OzRewardS (2%)

Pretty cool, isn’t it? However, there are fee associated with using this service, which includes

• $10/year membership (deducted from your cashback)
• 2% withdrawal fee when you want to cash out, but they are working on eliminating it

The community aspect is, they don’t care how much you benefit from this service — whether it is $10 or $1000. You just pay your membership fee, and then can claim as much as possible from their 100% cashback schemes. But then issue is, if they are running as a company and are aiming to maximise the profit, they can only do so by increase number of memberships, and they won’t necessarily try to encourage a sale or other follow up process. Just like your local RSL club/community :)

I have a brief test and it looks like they are using CommissionMonster to get the commissions, and on their merchants page they are listing over 500 shops where you can get moneyback from.

Now, there is a big problem. They are still in beta, and the website has that “under construction” smell all over the place. Their webserver is in Houston TX, and the “secure” part of their service is not even secured by HTTPS!

So here is the request. MoneyBackCo’s founder, Steve, is requesting some beta testers, who would like to sign up an account, play around, and provide them with some feedback to iron out remaining issues. In return, MoneyBackCo will waive the first year membership fee ($10).

I think account approval is currently manually processed as there’s a limited number of testing accounts available (mine was activated after a few hours). So if you are interested in this 100% cashback service, head down there and sign up an account before the next time you shop online.

Update: Check their Apple Mac Promotion page on all the limited stock items.

I just found out that Harris Technology is selling cheap Apple Macs — the slightly out-dated model. Still very nice, and quite a bit cheaper than the current line-ups.

Take this Macbook Pro for example.

• Intel Core Duo 2Ghz
• 512Mb RAM
• 80Gb Hard Disk
• DVD+RW Optical Drive
• ATI Radeon X1600 128Mb video card

How much? $2,299, but you have to pick them up, i.e. no delivery. How about this 13″ Macbook?

• Intel Core Duo 2Ghz
• 512Mb RAM
• 80Gb Hard Disk
• DVD+RW Optical Drive

Middle of the range 6 months ago — and now $1,649, cheaper than the current entry level Macbook with only 1.83Ghz CPU, 60Gb hard disk and CD-RW/DVD combo drive.

I guess the biggest difference is that the current Macbook Pro/Macbook has Intel Core 2 Duo processors, whereas the slightly older generation has Core Duo (without the 2 in the middle). Core 2 Duo should be slightly faster per clock speed, and most importantly it has EM64T support if you are keen to use 64bit operating systems (like installing Linux x86_64 or 64bit Windows). Not that much difference if you are stuck with MacOS X. Yet these out-going model is much cheaper.

But not all the out-going models are inferior. This very desirable Mac Mini begs to differ.

• Intel Core Duo 1.6Ghz
• 512Mb RAM
• 80Gb Hard Disk
• DVD+RW Optical Drive

IIRC Apple Mac Mini is still using Intel Core Duo, so the above system actually has better specification than the current entry level Mac Mini which has 60Gb hard disk and CD-RW/DVD combo drive. And the price? $799, that’s $150 cheaper than the current entry-level model.

There are actually more clearance item from Harris Technology, which I haven’t had a chance to do a “full scan”. Vote those deals on OzBargain here, here and here.

And somewhat related — noneother has reported that you can save $199 when you buy a Mac and an iPod at the same time — but only if you are a student (who already has big 10%+ academic discount from Apple). Nice, if you qualify :)