Wal-Mart Offering $398 Laptop During Holiday Season

Mike Howes 8 Nov, 2006 at 11:53am ET Article published in Tech

Wal-Mart has started selling Compaq Laptops for $398 as a run-up to Thanksgiving in the hope of boosting their computer electronics sales.

Unfortunately the special offer is in-store only, so ordering online will not be an option. However it’s still worth a trip to your local store as it packs an impressive hardware lineup.

Your $398 will buy you a Compaq Presario V5305WM sporting a Sempron 3300+ running at 2.00GHz, 512MB of RAM and a 60GB HDD. It also comes standard with a 15.4′ High-Definition Widescreen display and includes Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition. There is loads of “free” software that comes bundled with the notebook.

[i]Let’s hope this is not one of those limited offer ploys to get customers in the stores.[/i]

Source: CNet News

Comments

8 Nov 2006 ~ 1:33pm Leonardo You probably get exactly what the ad states. Whether you like Walmart or not, the generally don't pull punches with their advertising.

$398. That's impressive!
8 Nov 2006 ~ 2:23pm Garg Wow, I was thinking about buying my dad a similarly-specced laptop at twice the price. That's impressive! I'll have to see if any Wal-Marts have them in stock around here.
8 Nov 2006 ~ 2:25pm Leonardo Those laptops will fly off the shelves. There will be quite a number of early Christmas gifts to students this year.
8 Nov 2006 ~ 3:07pm Clutch I had a customer come into our office yesterday with one of these laptops. I had to setup his dial up connection on it so I had time to play around with it.

One thing you are going to have to do if you get one is to cut down on all the applications that load when the computer starts. Lots of software that you will not need you will have to uninstall. The computer runs really good and I wouldn't mind having one myself just for general use. The screen has good color and not much glare at all that I noticed. Overall a very good deal for the price.

BTW: His wife works at Wal-Mart and she said they got 60 of the laptops in and at 2:00 the next afternoon they had 3 left. So plan on getting to Wal-Mart early if you are looking at getting one, just a heads up. I don't know if all Wal-Marts will get 60 of them, or maybe less.
8 Nov 2006 ~ 4:38pm godzilla525 I'll be sure to steer clear of the electronics department of Wal-Mart this holiday season, lest I become trampled by rabid Christmas shoppers. I don't need a $400 laptop THAT bad...

The second thing that has me wondering is what cuts they had to make in order to get this thing on the shelves at that price. I sense battery fires and HDD failures in the not-too-distant future, along with a heaping helping of dead pixels.
8 Nov 2006 ~ 7:10pm Aranyic

godzilla525 wrote:

The second thing that has me wondering is what cuts they had to make in order to get this thing on the shelves at that price. I sense battery fires and HDD failures in the not-too-distant future, along with a heaping helping of dead pixels.

They just make enough on it in the first place to cut it that far most likely. I imaging the will more or less break even / make a slight margin on the laptop. But they will be offering all sorts of accessories with it that they will make thier money on. Same strategy that video game consoles use. They lose money on the console and make it back on games/accessories.
8 Nov 2006 ~ 7:14pm Thrax No, Walmart will bleed money out their ass for that laptop. As will Best Buy with its competing Black Friday adverts.

The money is made up in services and accessories.
8 Nov 2006 ~ 8:17pm fatcat Wow, old news lol.

I picked mine up at 12:01am saturday night(sunday morning i guess . The WM here had 49 of them come in. I was #22 in line. They were all sold out by 12:09am. But I'm sure they probably have more in stock now. Those of us there got a free laptop backpack, mini USB2.0 4 port hub, and optical laptop usb mouse also.

Once our BestBuy opened sunday i went and got a stick of 512mb ram on sale to make 1 gig total (it comes with 1 stick 512mb PC2700 DDR, but ram is shared with Radeon xpress 200m). So for about $460 I had a pretty nice laptop for the money. The 15.4" widescreen looks very well.

Be warned if you get one though. It comes with a 60GB hdd, but only has about 41GB free. It has an 11gb partition for recovery purposes, and then about 6-8GB worth of HP crap (games,shareware,etc) on it. I did an image of the hdd, then formated it and did a clean install. XP drivers on the compaq website work with Vista.