Walmart and Best Buy appear to have kicked off a price war in time for the back-to-school shopping season, with each retailer offering Compaq laptops with 15.6-inch screens for under US$300.
Walmart is selling Hewlett-Packard’s Compaq Presario CQ62-219WM for $298 through its online store. Best Buy is selling a Compaq Presario CQ60-615DX for $299 on its web site.
The laptops have comparable specifications. Both come having a single-core Intel Celeron 900 processor running at 2.2GHz and consist of 2GB of DDR2 memory. They also have 250GB hard drives, wired and 802.11 b/g/ wireless networking capabilities, DVD burners and Intel’s 4500M integrated graphics.
The systems come with Microsoft Windows 7 House Premium 64-bit OS and consist of other applications frequently referred to as bloatware. One notable feature absent from the laptops is really a webcam.
Best Buy is also selling a $299 Toshiba Satellite C655-S5049 laptop on its website. That laptop computer also has a 15.6-inch screen and Celeron 900 processor, but includes 2GB of the quicker DDR3 memory kind.
The cost war is comparable to one that broke out prior to final year’s back-to-school season, said Stephen Baker, vice president of business analysis at The NPD Group. That battle ignited last July when Best Buy offered an Acer laptop computer for $299, and Walmart undercut the price by $1 having a Compaq machine.
“They are selling them simply because they drive visitors into the shops, provide excellent value to their clients [and] assist every other compete against one more,” Baker said.
The stores will maintain at it for as lengthy as PC makers supply them with items that permit them to hit those price points, Baker said. PC makers may have tweaked configurations, by decreasing the amount of memory or hard drive capacity, for example, to let the stores sell the machines for much less.
But reviewers seem to become content with the products. On the Best Buy website, 463 reviewers gave the Compaq laptop computer an average rating of 4.5 out of five stars. On the Walmart website, 15 reviewers gave its $298 laptop close to a 5 star rating.
One Walmart reviewer mentioned the laptop is great for fundamental productivity and Internet applications, but not for much more demanding tasks.
“With an Intel Celeron 900 processor and 2GB of RAM, don’t expect to be zipping via video editing apps, especially considering it’s a single-core CPU,” wrote one reviewer under the name noraaregnilc.