Sunday specials: Wal-Mart, Best Buy battle over $300 laptops
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The $298 Compaq laptop that generated so much coverage this week goes on sale at Wal-Mart today. Hopefully no one was trampled this morning, but if Best Buy's recent experience with a $300 Acer laptop is any indication, it could be tough to get your hands on this one.
HP is taking orders on a nearly identical model. Their configuration of the Compaq CQ60Z starts at $350 with a 15.6-inch display, 2.1GHz AMD Sempron SI-42, 2GB of memory, Nvidia GeForce 8200M graphics, 160GB hard drive and Vista Home Basic. That's not as good a deal as Wal-Mart's model, the Compaq Presario CQ60-419WM, which has 3GB of memory and costs $50 less, but it's still not bad.
Computerworld noticed one big drawback with these $300 laptops equipped with Vista Home Basic: HP is not offering free upgrades to Windows 7, which ships on October 22.