Book Reviews and Money Saving Tips

Back a couple of blog posts, I talked about the inkjet cartridges folks using the razor blade vendor’s marketing strategy. Give away the razor and sock it to them with the blades. Visiting Staples today, I checked to see if there was a Staples brand compatible cartridge for my Canon Pixma ip2600. The Staples guy told me they were being forced to discontinue their store brand inkjet cartridges by the printer manufacturers. He stated that Staples was told to remove the compatible cartridges or “they” the manufactures would discontinue stocking their printers at Staples. Hmm, that sounds like it could be true. It also sounds like coercion. Federal Trade Commission take note, this sounds like a restriction of competition through coercion. Sure sounds like racketeering to me or at least price fixing. Restricting a reseller from offering a competitive product that provides a substantial cost benefit to the end user hardly seems to be offering a stimulus to the American publi...

Christmas comes once a year at least the last time I checked. I have gotten my annual calendar printed at Staples for years. Last year I used their on-line creator and it worked well. This year on December 4th I tried to use their on-line service and it was dismal. It wouldn’t upload my photos so I tried to call customer support. That was a waste to time and finally I hung up on the elevator music and looked for other vendors. I ended up at VistaPrint. I find their site annoying due to the constant badgering to add more to your cart. However their calendar creating software worked smoothly and all 13 of my images uploaded in substantially less time than I had been able to get on photo up on the Staples site. I have not seen the end product but I have ordered from VistaPrint in the past and the products have been acceptable. So if you plan on doing a calendar as a gift, I recommend looking at VistaPrint. I received no remunerations whatsoever for this recommendat...

Notebooks are always a volatile purchase. It is practically inevitable that on the way home from picking up your hot, new, great value notebook, you will see or hear an advertisement for a better, cheaper, sexy notebook. The best compromise deal (balancing features, performance and price) I have found recently is the HP Pavilion dv6-1030us Entertainment Notebook PC at Staples for a final down and dirty price of $599.98. I found the same notebook at Amazon for an additional $200.00. The price involves rebates so be prepared to wait for some of your money back. This notebook is a better value than the one Staples seems to be pushing for $50.00 less which doesn’t have as large hard drive, has no bluetooth and a smaller screen. If you don’t need the size and the DVD burner, I would look at some of the netbooks. They are pretty darn sweet and in the $299.00 range. Specifications Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T6400 16.0" Diagonal High Definition(8) HP BrightView Display HP Mesh Imprint fi...