My Geeky Bargain of the Day!


Well, I found this gem and just had to share. One of our faculty members had one of her old UPS systems die so I was looking for a replacement for her at CDWG.com when I found a 1250VA APC Back-UPS NS for only $92 with free shipping for us (educational price, no tax). For "retail" purchasers it is actually less ($89.99) but you have to pay about $10 shipping! That is quite a deal for a 1250VA UPS with AVR, although I had never heard of the "NS" series before (although it looks and specs out very similarly to APC "RS" series LCD units we have.) But that is definitely a deal. And if you want to purchase 11 of these babies, it will only run you $879.99! That's only $79.99 each! In comparison perennial favorite NewEgg.com is selling the identical UPS for a more typical $199.99. How can CDW be selling this unit so cheaply? I will not complain, and instead have just ordered another one for another lab in the department that just bought a new Dell Precision workstation that needs to be protected. Here I go again saving the university more money while they continue to freeze our salaries. I just can't pass up a good bargain! I am even replacing the pre-installed Red Hat Enterprise 5.3 on the Precision with CentOS 5.4 so we can keep updating that system forever without having to pay Red Hat a whopping $30/year (our educational price again). Hey, CentOS is pretty much identical to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so why not?

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