Should I purchase 3250 now or wait?

Greetings,
I am attending law school in the fall and the requirement is for a windows laptop with xp pro. Currently i own an ibook and wish I could just keep that use virtual pc but its no go. Anyway, I stumbled across Averatec looking on Amazon and am thinking of purchasing a 3250. However, my questions: Will a new 3200 model be coming out soon and would it be better to wait? or would it be better to take the rebate before the end of this month? would the 3300 be worth the extra cash and so you see this being dicounted (when a new model comes out etc.) soon? I am new to the whole pc thing and really appreciate any help on this. Thanks.

 

That's a tough one! But also consider this angle. If you don't buy the 3250 now when there is a rebate, it is most likely that by Aug/Sept, you will get a used (or even new) one on eBay for the same or less. And there may even be a newer model then that you like better.

 

The 3270 is already out and no matter where you buy it from there's a 100-150 rebate (I forget which). We got ours at Staple's for net 799USD. I don't know what the difference between the 3270 and 3250 are, but I would wager that the 3270 has more and/or better features.

They are great little PC and if you run the calibrations on the battery and fan they get quieter and more power efficient, there's also some stuff on the averatecforums site that has some other ways to really quiet it down and prolong the life of the battery.

 

thanks for the replies! yeah i found out about the 3270 just after posting that message.. thanks for the info though - another question: how often are these rebates offered? is it every few weeks or so? i dont really need a computer until July so should i just wait a few months and see what happens/prices go down or is the 3270 for $800 available for the next few days a great deal that may not surface again?

 

crap triple post...but the edit icon isn't showing on my posts...

As for advice. You can wait without fear. You'll get a rebate. The economy isn't going to pick up that quick.

BUT. The upgrade/release cycle may be at a low point when you decide to buy and you run the risk of immediately seeing a much better deal as soon as you get around to buying it. That's what prompted us to grab the 3270 right away. IT looked like the cycle was peaking for a bit and opportunity met need at a good point so it will be used as soon as I iron out the drivers (just a nuisance, and I WILL post links to the drivers I used unlike charging people like so many of those godless heathen sites out there that take advantage of less moderately technical people and half the time have the wrong or way old drivers posted anyhow).

But if you just want a good deal for some pretty good and full featured hardware, you still can't go wrong iwth Averatec. And everything is going to have 512 ddr or better pretty soon, and processors are about to start ramping again so you're not going to lose any way you look at it. Put the 1000 bucks in a high gain account for a few months and you'll probably come out ahead. Or if you arlready have investments you can leave that grand wherever it is for a few more months and let it accrue a bit more.

 

whoops, sorry for the double post. But...have you looked into VMWare? It may be compatible with OSX. We use it at work all the time. IT hates it because we run our corporate XP builds inside of a linux install and it defeats their scans and other interruptive intrusions into our work environment. There's nothing like being in the middle of ripping through code for a few hours and having a security patch checker pop up and tell you YOU MUST APPLY PATCH AND SYSTEM WILL REBOOT NO MATTER WHAT and getting about 30 seconds to scramble to save work.

But what are they gonna do about it? That's right. Nothing. Except throw more automated tools at us which we subsequently defeat with VMware and Zone Alarm (for those who don't use VMWare).

*grin*

 

All the PC/notebook vendors seem to offer frequent rebates, but the question really is whether you want to buy it locally or get it off the net. I prefer to wait for the special, special deals at local places and invariably they coincide with a hefty rebate, because that's the nature of it.

I got my hp notebook for 1500 and then there were two hefty rebates with it, one from the store (50) and one from hp (150). But I had special requirements...mainly one wiht a gig of ddr in it, a fast processor, and under 1500. That one had an AMD64 3200 and a gig, and then a week later I saw the same series but with a 3400 proc in it for 150 more net. Though still meeting my requirements, the one I bought was fast enough for me not to want to bother with a return and repurchase, but the hp rebate was present for both. Usually the mfr asigns the rebate for a whole series of products, not just a specific one. The local vendors (staples, office max, fry's etc) usually have a special package that no other local vendors may have (some sales agreement between vendor and mfr) but you can usually find the equivalent model online somewhere.

In the 3270's case, there had been various updated versions of the 3220 my wife had (the 3250 is one) but none made us really want to bite at it, and they were usually only offered 1-2 weeks at whatever store got the deal with averatec to offer that "special" (only locally) model. When the 3270 popped up, we knew that was the one to buy because it was the result of 2-3 upgrades to the same series and it probably wouldn't go stale for a few months so we got down to the store the same day the ad came out and were lucky enough to score one onsite without having to wait for the next stock to come in (in the 3220s case, we had to wait 4 days for it to arrive at the store, but we paid NO shipping, which can be 70-100 or more...check the ship costs for a Dell and you'll see what I mean...some places offer free shipping on higher dollar items to get you to buy, but then you're subject to UPS, Fed EX or whoever's handling of your unit...unlike store shipments which are backed by the store and handled by regular freight carriers who are actually held responsible for the condition of their freight...)

There's no way to tell what or when the rebates are going to be or who is going to offer a bonus rebate on top of the mfrs rebate at any given time except that the rebates are very frequent and nearly invariably you'll see a bonus one tied with a store promo.

At least that's the way it happens here in Oregon. It may be different in other states for various reasons outside of just "the cost of things".

HTH

PS looking up my drivers, bookworm. Thanks. They're still not on the averatec site. Bummer.

 

The AV3250 is based on AMD Athlon XP-M running at 266 mhx.
The AV3270 has a AMD Mobile Sempron 2800+ CPU.

Does that mean the newer 3270 will have better battery life?

I am unable to find AV3270 with XP Pro. How difficult and expensive to upgrade from XP Home to Pro?

 

Upgrade to XPpro and you'll probably be fine. Usually if you go the upgrade path, all the drivers from xphome will stay alive during the transition. I've done a few systems like that and the only thing is do not start the upgrade unless you have all the authentication stuff you need. DOn't take a friend's version of XPpro and try to use it with an expired or used key. It will reject you in the middle of the upgrade.

I have VLK (volume license key) wiht my XPpro, so maybe it is a little different than retail. I once tried to change an install from an individually licensed copy to the VLK version and XP got confused and barfed. I had to initiate a repair from the VLK version of XPpro from scratch, which blew away ALL the updates I had on that system. The upshot is that all the installed programs, drivers, etc were just fine after the repair. I had to reload nothing. BUT. I had to go back through and run all the windows updates again. Upgrade may not do that to you though, especially if you're buying a retail packaged upgrade version that is specifically intended to go on top of XPhome. IIRC it was pretty seamless the few times that I've had to do it. What impressed me the most was that I upgraded a win2k machine and it worked fantastically. That was something new for M$, that's for sure...upgrading from 3.1->95->98->me->nt erk. All those went badly...

I don't do a lot of upgrades, even though we use a lot of branded machines which are invariably loaded with XPhome (even if it is sometimes available for upgrade from factory, why pay extra for XPpro preloaded when we have VLK anyhow?). I have them buy a lot of the same model once we decide what to use, build one system nicely from scratch, then use Ghost to reimage the others. It takes about 5 minutes to shoot an image onto a machine from the Ghost server compared to the pain of installing every time...multiply that by like 100 machines and you can see why I don't bother upgrading. If it wasn't also a hassle I'd have em just shipped blank w/ no OS installed at all.

I also don't like all the adware crap that is on machines when you buy them so I usually burn down a machine when I get it anyhow.

Usually all the stuff one needs is available from the vendor or OEMs to put one back together in short order...

Averatec dropped the ball on thsi one, though, and the drivers for the 3270 are not yet available on their site.

See this thread for additional whining about availability of 3270 drivers:
http://www.notebookreview.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=14218&whichpage=1