Acer 3680-2682 Laptop For $399 USD at Walmart U.S.A ….What A Bargain!

by Das Brain

Acer Aspire 3680 laptop notebookWhen I was on vacation in southern California, I bought an Acer Aspire 3680-2682 laptop at a Walmart in Colton, California. It was actually on my list of things to buy while I was on vacation, simply because there was no way to get a brand new laptop anywhere in Toronto for less than $460.00 CAD plus 14 percent GST and PST (provincial tax).

The Acer Aspire 3680-2682 was selling in Toronto at FutureShop and BestBuy.ca stores for $459.99 CAD during the time I was in California. The cheapest I’ve seen it when I got back to Toronto was from BestBuy.ca which was selling them for $429 CAD, however it was only online and in limited quantity. When I checked they were already sold out.

As the title of this post suggest, I bought the Acer Aspire 3680-2682 for $399 USD back in late August. After 8% U.S tax at time of purchase at Walmart it came to $430.92 USD. The Canadian dollar to U.S dollar exchange rate was 0.94 (1 USD = 1.06 CAD). At that exchange rate the final total price in Canadian dollar would come to $456.7752 CAD. This is way cheaper than buying in Toronto which consisted of paying $460 CAD + 14 percent tax, which comes to $524.40 CAD. The difference here is $67.63 CAD, that is a diference of roughtly 15 percent. I was in the U.S anyway, so why not save money on a big ticket item like a laptop while I was there, it beats buying a laptop in Toronto, Canada.

The specification on the Acer 3680-2682 is as follows:

CPU Processor: Intel Celeron M 440 – 1.86GHz 1MB Level 2 Cache
Bus Speed: 533MHz
Memory: 512 MB
LCD screen size: 14.1 inches WXGA (wide screen)
Graphics Card: Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 S-Video out
Hard Drive: 80GB
DVD / CD-RW Combo
Wireless Networking: 802.11 b/g    
Operating System: Windows Vista Basic                        
5-in-1 Media Card Reader

Right now, this instant BestBuy.ca is selling the Acer Aspire 3680-2917 14.1″ Intel Celeron M 520 1.60GHz Laptop for $599.95 CAD. The difference between the Acer Aspire 3680-2682 I bought and this one that BestBuy.ca is selling is that the one I bought has 512MB of RAM less which cost a mere $30 CAD, and the one I bought has an Intel Celeron M 1.86MHz CPU processor, which is faster than the one BestBuy.ca is selling right now. So for 512MB of RAM more, 40 GIG more hard drive space and a slower Intel CPU you can pay an $140 CAD more than what I paid by buying from BestBuy.ca. Oh, but I forgot to mention that BestBuy.ca only sell the Acer Aspire 3680-2917 with a french Windows Vista, and they are out of stock. One more thing don’t forget to add 14 percent tax on top of $599.95 CAD which will bring it to $683.94CAD. Please go to BestBuy.ca and check now.  It really is depressing, how Canadian retailers rip off Canadian citizens.

FutureShop.ca is NOT much better, in terms of laptop deals right now. Walmart U.S.A will be offering laptops in the range of $325 to $400 USD during their post Thanksgiving Black Friday week sale according to a news source I’ve been following.

After using the Acer Aspire 3680-2682 laptop for tha last 3 motnths or so, I can safely say that I really like this entry level laptop. The main use of my Acer Aspire 3680-2682 is for trading stocks / options using the OptionsXpress.ca platform and web design and the Acer Aspire laptop has more than enough power to do the job.

The only complaint that I have is that Windows Vista stinks, and needs more RAM to run faster. Windows Vista is a memory hog, and running it with less than 1 GB of RAM is not recommended. In light of this fact, the only upgrade I will need for this Acer Aspire 3680 laptop is an extra 512 MB of RAM (PC4200 DDR2 SODIMM 533MHz) which is like $30 CAD or less.

In conclusion, I really like this Acer Aspire laptop and I’m glad I saved big by buying it in the United States.

You read MoneyAccumulator.com to learn how to make money in stocks, options and from the internet, but as important as making money is, saving money on your purchases of goods which keeps more money your pocket is just as important.  Please read other post about spending your money wisely under the “Personal Finance” and “Travel” categories.

Bookmark at:
StumbleUpon | Digg | Del.icio.us | Dzone | Newsvine | Spurl | Simpy | Furl | Reddit | Yahoo! MyWeb

One Response to “Acer 3680-2682 Laptop For $399 USD at Walmart U.S.A ….What A Bargain!”

  1. [...] Back in late August of last year I purchased an Acer Aspire 3680 – 2682 laptop from Walmart in southern California which came with Windows Vista Home. You can read up on the specifications here. The only reason why I left the Windows Vista operating system on it was because I didn’t want to hunt down and install of all the device drivers over again, if I had replaced it with Windows XP. [...]