Black Friday (2021)

I gave up on Black Friday, to many nuts out there anymore.

I only needed to buy Christmas gifts for my grandchildren. I bought everything online early before Thanksgiving to insure product availability and timely shipping. Everything arrived at the destination before Thanksgiving. I have no desire to deal with the hassle of local crowds while doing in-person shopping.

I'm done and ready for next Christmas.

We try to stay away from these days and go shopping during the week when everyone is supposed to be at work (LOL) Who works now?

I scored a power supply from newegg corsair rm650x $60 after rebate. It's somewhat top tier power supply. Don't need one at the moment but like to keep one on hand as spare.

Also scored an asus tuf b550 plus wifi from amazon for $145 last week. 5700G cpu from microcenter for $280, but that's been the going rate for a while there. Maybe it'll drop in price some more before my 30 days are up to get a price match.

PS for anyone building their own computer, best to get core parts (cpu/board/ram) from the same source. I went through 3 different boards before settling on the one above.

First board an asrock b550 taichi was just a turd. Would lock up hard when asked to reboot or ctrl-alt-del in the bios.

Next 2 boards, asus strix b550-f had an intel i225-v nic that is just beyond buggy. Would stall/become unstable, eventually causing machine to lock up. Known issue, has had 3 revisions but still junk. Gave up on that. Board above has a realtek rtl8125 nic. Similar 2.5gbps, but seems more mature and works. Moving foward, I will stay away from any board with a i225-v nic unless using wifi or a pci addon nic (have a few intel quad gigabit server cards around).

Costco had a good deal on Chromebook's, so we both got one for our mom's. They're both single and not tech savvy, so we figured it's the safest choice for them these days.
Now if we could just block all the phone scammers! Relentless!

~Angela

...and it's safe to assume that you carefully checked the model purchased for its End of Updates date!

These are good till the end of the decade.

~Angela

Picked up an amazon fire hd tablet from qvc about a month ago. It was $80 shipped for the 2021 model, 10", 32gb storage, 3gb ram. Not much to write home about.

There's a tool called fire toolbox that allows adding google services and removing the amazon bloatware - https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/windows-tool-fire-toolbox... .

Looking more deeply at the unit's software state, it comes with android 9, with the last security update from sometime in 2018. My intended use is email and web browsing from the couch or bed. Videos on a 10" display just look cheesy to me compared to a monitor or proper tv.

So, effectively the unit is EOL already, but amazon continues to sell these things by the truckload. Their latest firmware update (7.3.2.2), disables the ability to disable ota updates and launcher (probably disables disablement of some other things too). At this point this unit will never receive another update as i want to keep using my custom launcher. Sadly these units are bootloader locked at this time so no way to install any none amazon firmware.

^^Those chromebooks, are they bootloader locked too?

Ugh I just ordered a board (Asrock B550 Phantom Gaming ITX) with i225 LAN. I was hoping the latest revision would have resolved this issue already. Maybe I should cancel the order.

I've had experience with 2 asrock boards now, an older z170 mini itx and the one in the post above. After using asus for over a decade, i chose the ryzen asrock because it had lots of features. The z170 mini itx was bought used on ebay because I needed that form factor in a z170 board 5 years after that chipset was released. Very few options.

I find the asus bios to be more user friendly/mature/better laid out.

Re nic, some report no issues at all, so it's seems to be a combination of something. Probably cpu/board. Can't imagine the ram or any other component having anything to do with it. I had nic issues on all 3 boards (b550 taichi, and the 2 asus boards).

Where did you order from? Amazon and microcenter are easy returns. Not sure about newegg, rarely buy from them any more, even more rarely return.

there were not any good deals, it's more of a sham these days.

I guess I have some benchmarks, such as when I bought a brand new Lenovo ThinkPad in Sept 2020, from Lenovo's eBay store, for $649. It is a business core i7 with a 3 year warranty being a business model.

I've looked from time to time and nothing has come close since. The list was supposedly $2300 (but I could find no evidence that was really the sell price, more like $1500). Still, from $1500 to $649 isn't bad for a core i7 and business grade, brand new and 3 year business warranty.

My wife's aunt bought a Lenovo for that price from a Best Buy black Friday special and it doesn't even come close. It's consumer grade, 1 year warranty, and the hinges were crooked if you can believe that, right out of the box.

the only reason I got the ThinkPad was my 2015 is Windows 7, and turbotax requires Windows 10 for TY 2020...

Amazon too was imho disappointing....

Yes. I specially despise the repeated variations on the theme of a call claiming to be from Amazon customer service advising me that my account just bought an iPhone, but they think something might be funny, so to call them to straighten things out.

For maximum absurdity, there is the one claiming to be from the Federal Reserve stating that they are about to file a lawsuit against me, but to get in touch before things are too late.

If you have caller ID try this. After they give you the spill about pressing #1, go ahead and press it. When the person gets on the line, say something like Hey Fred or Gail and when the person says this is so and so, say, Fred, (or whoever), came up on my caller ID. The phone will usually go silent and then they will hang up. I do this when I want to mess with the wingnuts. They other one I do is play them music off of my cellphone. Of course, my brother will ask them to hold on for a second and then puts down the phone and walks away. That works too. I have found that I am not getting as many calls as I once did. Maybe they are putting me on a do-not-call list.

I get these calls, also

My wife got an item 1/2 price at Target on Black Friday, an instant pot.

amazon has the very same price, so why not just get it online lol

Any good news on the phone is a simple "all clear" type of message.

Bad news becomes "please call us."

I'm referring to medical in the above. If you get a call from any type of medical entity not stating that your test was negative, you know there's a serious problem.

If there is no problem, it's a simple, good morning Mr. Pink, this is Iryna from Dr. Nemoy's office, your test results were negative.

The other is good morning Mr. Pink, this is Iryna from Dr. Nemoy's office, please give us a call when you get this message.

Point being, there will never be details such as this is the IRS we are pursing you and you must call immediately with xyz. That's detailed and a tip off that it's totally fake.

The moral is there can be good news on the phone, bad news implied, but never ever ever bad news detailed in a message. my .02

p.s. this reminds me I got a threatening voicemail from an attorney, and when I googled the attorney, it was a real person, the caller ID was real, and it was a prestigious law firm in Center City. I decided well, it sounds real, but the person he addressed was not me. Therefore? I'll ignore this caller. But I was rattled and I did think, you're threatening someone in a voicemail? Give me a break, that should be certified mail and a process server. Never heard any more. although in this day and age it is very possible to send out fake caller ID.

Yep, confirmed intel on these boards terrible vs realtek, despite I never like realtek one. Tks and have great weakend!

Is it just the b550 boards you think or all boards in general. I'm really confused why some are having no issues at all. The only common thread is the i225v nic. I imagine everyone would have issues.

Black Friday is becoming very big in Canada for the last several years now. Last year I found Black Friday prices better than Boxing Day sales. This year I did not find it much attractive except for TVs. I found Amazon Echo Show 10 on sale in Bestbuy Canada for $95 off. SO I bought this device online and picked it up in the store. Bestbuy was not busy at at all surprising on that day.