Did anyone go out and brave the mobs to get Black Friday deals? Here's my insane story.

Got home at 11:30 pm from a day of wedding stuff, surfed the Internet, forgot it was Thursday night and FF was due, threw that together, stayed up all night, left the house at 3:30 am, lined up at Circuit City from 3:45 am 'til 5:00 am when they opened, fought off crazed bargain hunters, got home at 6:00 am.

The in-between part was expensive. Most people were there for a loss leader Toshiba notebook for $199, which was really $450 if you didn't sign up for a year of AOL. They passed out vouchers for the hot items so that those who lined up got rewarded. They ran out of those notebook vouchers early and when they announced it, about two dozen people around me left. I must say that everyone I dealt with was very nice. Nobody tried to stab me or take my Cabbage Patch kid or Tickle Me Elmo.

I wound up buying a 15" HD ready LCD TV with S-video and component video inputs for $188. Perfect for my bedroom. I was on the hunt for a laptop and since the $199/$450 one was gone I opted to get the next best deal. For $800 I got an Acer with a 15.4" widescreen LCD, AMD Turion 64-bit Mobile processsor (1.6GHz; the ML version which is supposedly more powerful than the M version of the Turion), 1 GB of DDR333 RAM, 100 GB HD, intergrated 802.11g, built-in dual layer +/- DVD/CD burner, and I got a "free" Epson printer and "free" D-Link 802.11g wireless router. It's not what I call a super smoking steal but it's pretty good. I didn't get a $1200 laptop for $200 as we all wish we could but I figured I saved a couple hunder bucks. What do you think?

Just for reference, the Toshiba they had for $199/$450 was a 15" LCD, Intel Celeron 370, 512 RAM, 40 GB HD, intergrated wireless g, and DVD-ROM/CD-RW.

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