My Technophilic Musings

My Sites: My Blog | My Tech Blog | Follow me on Twitter
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Last time we discussed how to select the gadget that you want to buy. This time I’ll tell you some of the things that I do to find the best price for it.

• Use Price Comparison Engines: These engines will let you search for your desired products and provide a comparison of the costs at which they are available at different stores online as well as offline. Two of my favourites are Price Grabber and Froogle. Price Grabber has the added benefits of providing user reviews about the product as well.
• Deal Sites: Many sites across the web aggregate the latest deals. Some are run by the site owners, e.g., Deals2Buy, HotDealsClub etc, which are mostly almost same to each other. Some are run by the community, e.g. slickdeals, fatwallet, etc.These have an added advantage that the discussion that takes place on the original discussion adds a lot of value and insight in terms of how to stack on even better deals on top of it, provides comparison to other deals, rumours about coming deals in advance, and even deals local to your state, city or a particular store as well.
• Bargain Sites: These sites sell overstocked products at a cheap price. Some of the popular ones are Overstock, Smart Bargains, W00t, Stootsi, etc. W00t and Stootsi are a bit different in the sense that they have very limited number of products available at a time for sale (generally just 1).
• Coupon Codes Sites: Many sites aggregate coupon codes for various online and offline stores that you can use with your purchase to lower the price further. However, you need to go through the terms and conditions of the coupon to make sure that it applies to your purchase, and you might also need some convincing powers to use them in some cases . Some of the sites are Wow-Coupons and Current Codes. Continue reading »
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  Quote of the day: “When due process fails us, we really do live in a world of terror.” - JC Denton

  written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: cash back, deals, deals2buy, discount coupons, fatwallet, Gadgets, geeks, hotdealsclub, money, overstock, pricematch, slickdeals, smart bargains, stootsi, w00t
  

My Sites: My Blog | My Tech Blog | Follow me on Twitter
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If you are a gadget freak like me and can’t resist the temptations to buy the newest toy on the shelves, then you’d obviously want to eek out the maximum you can from whatever budget you have. But while doing so you have to take care of a lot of things. Here is Part I of the few things that I do get the best deals out there while making sure I’m buying the right thing from the right place.

The first step to buying anything is obviously whether you are buying the right thing. The list of do’s and don’t and this regard are:

• Do not blindly go by the what the manufacturer’s site says. After all I’ll always say that I my product is the best.
• Do not just make the decision based on the feature set. More features mean more possible points of failure, so a device with fewer features but better reliability is obviously much better than the one that promises the moon but only the “once in a blue -“ kinds.
• Make sure to search for similar products from other manufacturers. Just because it comes from Apple’s stable doesn’t make it the best. (For the record, in general, I don’t like anything that comes from Cupertino)
• Look for the reviews. Search for the reviews for the product you have in mind, but a big problem with this has now arisen with the advent of “paid reviews”. But of course, you can always turn towards the community. Read through all the site-based single person reviews as well but also look for forums and other communities related to the type of gadget you have in mind. e.g. – For cameras, DPReview is a good place to go, for WM smart phones, XDA-Developers is the place to be, etc.
• Is the after-sales support good? You don’t want to be locked out with a product that you can’t do anything about if something goes wrong.
• Look also for the hidden costs of product. Many a times the base product is cheap but then it requires you to shell out a fortune in terms of required accessories to yield it’s full potential (e.g. Archos players).
• Maintenance costs:e.g. Most Apple products dont have easily replaceable parts and need to be sent back to factory for even things like a new battery.

Now, the list above seems small but when put into practice it isn’t. But obviously, a geek who can handle all the latest electronic gizmos can surely handle the irks that come while chosing one, and of course, within a short while, it will become second nature to you.

Are there any other things that you look for buying your new boy-toy? Do let me know. Next time, we will look at how to get the best deals for the stuff you crave.

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Quote of the day: Morpheus: If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: Apple, cupertino, deals, Gadgets, geeks, reviews, stuff

My Sites: My Blog | My Tech Blog | Follow me on Twitter
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If you think that all geeks do is walk around wearing thick glasses, code in unreadable languages and make weird gizmos from parts scrapped out of your junkyard, well you think wrong. We do like to have our share of fun. And what better to begin the day with a nice hot cuppa along with some geeky humour. Folks, here it is, the 5 comic strips that I love the most (in no particular order):

1. Dilbert: Our friendly neighbourhood engineer is in town. Have fun reading through his daily life’s traumas. Of course, his tragedies couldn’t be as funny without the able support of the likes of Wally, Asok, dogbert, catbert, and yeah the “pointy haired manager”.

2. XKCD: Don’t know if this is the abbreviated form of something but the author calls it a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. You’d be frowning at your monitor screen right now, trying to understand the relation between these things but you know the saying, There is the biggest order behind the biggest chaos (or something, I just made up that saying just now )

3. Userfriendly: This is a story about a small ISP with your regular, average joe, sys-admins having a fun time at the expense of their unsuspecting management and, of course, about Pitr who has bigger plans for world domination than even google.

4. Ctrl+Alt+Del: Your last resort on Windows is now your daily appetite in the form of this little story about (mis)adventures of a group of nerdy friends who just love to get into trouble, all while playing that game of Halo with one hand (and that too tied behind their backs).

5. Penny Arcade: If you are a gamer, you can’t miss this. Even “Jack Thomson” couldn’t, so you know, this one is a keeper ;-).

So, go and have a nice time and yeah, don’t forget to tell me about what are your favourite tech comics.

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Quote of the day: Homer: [drunk] Look, the thing about my family is there’s five of us. Marge, Bart, Girl Bart, the one who doesn’t talk, and the fat guy. How I loathe him.

written by Shantanu Goel \\ tags: Comics, ctrl+alt+del, dilbert, fun, geeks, humour, penny arcade, tech comics, userfriendly, xkcd