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Holiday Helpdesk Deals

The Holiday Help Desk really is about helping. And that means helping you save money too. Once an hour during the help desk we got special deals from Shopper.com to announce. Just some ways of saving money on gadgets to say thank you for hanging out with CNET. So take a look below for the details on our shopping deals.

Desktops CompUSA -CompUSA.com has the HP Pavilion a6200n for $559.99, after a $50 mail-in rebate, plus free shipping. Regular price is $609.99 Sale price is $559.99 Savings $50 Offer ends 1/5/2008

Car Tech … Read more

Holiday Help Desk live on Friday, November 23

Join CNET TV on Friday, November 23 for the Holiday Help Desk our live, 10-hour call-in show. Whether you need advice on software, games, electronics, gadgets, computers, or anything else technological under the sun, experts will be answering your holiday tech shopping questions live from 8 a.m. PST to 6 p.m. PST.

Call 1-888-900-CNET with your questions on Friday or e-mail them in advance to holidayhelp@cnet.com. If your call is answered on the air, you'll be entered into a drawing to win one of eight Nintendo Wii Holiday Mega Bundles valued at $600. Included in … Read more

Gadget blog and upscale NYC department store--a match made in heaven?

According to the PSFK blog, Manhattan's legendary luxury department store Henri Bendel is so notoriously old-school that it launched its first Web site a month ago. But the retailer is moving a step further into the Digital Age by opening a holiday gadget "pop-up store"-- curated by bloggers--inside its Fifth Avenue space.

Last year, Bendel had a holiday shop centered on the youth-oriented mobile phone carrier Helio.

But for 2007, Popgadget, which caters to female readers who appreciate both style and function and is staffed by a team of writers around the world, has selected an … Read more

Oodle 2.0: More intelligent classifieds shopping

The classifieds aggregator site Oodle has just launched its 2.0 version. While the underlying functionality hasn't changed, the site got a good design refresh and now presents more relevant data to the user. And, of course, its database of crawled sites continues to grow, making the results more relevant.

As before, Oodle does some semantic analysis of your search query when you go looking for an item. If you type in "Toyota Sienna," Oodle knows it's a car, and on the results page lets you narrow your selection down by model year, color, mileage, and … Read more

Just tell me what to buy

Recommendr, a new social shopping site, mimics the Q&A feel of a company community message board.

You throw a question up on the site and hope that someone more knowledgeable than you--or someone who has already been through the experience and done the research--has a shortcut or answer to your latest consumer dilemma.

Users can ask or answer a question on any topic concerning a consumer purchase. Recommended items range from household cleaners to watches and include links to where you can buy a product. Users' rating are based on points. They are given five points for every … Read more

Making whatever you want at TechShop

After covering three Maker Faires over the last year and a half, one thing has become clear: there are one heck of a lot of people out there who like to make things.

For many people, this means toiling away in a garage, or a small workroom, using whatever tools they have handy. But there are limitations on what most people can make simply because they don't have that many tools and certainly don't have easy access to industrial fabrication tools.

Well, if you're in or near Silicon Valley, you may not know that you already have … Read more

Gift Girl helps men avoid blender blunders

For readers who remember the classic Father of the Bride scene where the wedding is almost called off because the groom bought a blender for the bride-to-be, there's a new service called Gift Girl, which might put an end to such mistakes. The site is designed to help men buy gifts for their female significant others by offering up a small, targeted selection of items for womenfolk, hand picked by the site's creators, one of whom, incidentally, has that newfangled XX chromosome.

Gifts are broken down into basic categories like jewelry, clothing, and "accessories." You can … Read more

At Wal-Mart, Black Friday comes early

It's happening again.

If you thought one minute past midnight the day after Thanksgiving was too early to choke out your fellow shoppers in the name of a great deal, you were wrong.

Following last year's decision to offer a $398 laptop several weeks ahead of the traditional Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving), Wal-Mart is planning on slashing prices on five items--in its stores, not online--beginning at 8 a.m. this Friday. One of them will be a $348 Acer laptop with 1GB of RAM. The other four items and their prices will be kept secret until … Read more

TechShop expands with 10 new locations

I'd like to pass along a press release from one of my favorite Silicon Valley start-ups. It's a place you can go to make chips... but I'd better explain that.

A lot of people do woodworking at home. The equipment is moderately priced and there's plenty of support available from TV shows such as Norm Abram's New Yankee Workshop on PBS and a variety of woodworking shows on the DIY Network.

But for those of us who like working with metal instead of wood, things aren't so simple. The equipment, for example, is much … Read more