Special Offers – Week of January 25th

Good afternoon all, hopefully everyone’s managing the return from the weekend at least reasonably well. For those who aren’t long-time readers, we generally do a post about what we have on special offer on a Monday afternoon, with the intention of having it up on the blog as early in the week as possible… it gives you guys as much of a chance to have a bit of a think about whether or not you’d really like something before it goes out of our Special Offers next Sunday.

This week, we’ve got some nice bits and pieces on offer, so we’ll get straight into them.

Netgear Stora:

Netgear’s Stora is a network attached storage (NAS) setup, for those of you who don’t know what a NAS is, don’t worry, it’s not complicated, and it’s unusually useful.

Click through to check out our page for Netgear's 1TB Stora 🙂

Essentially, a NAS box is a device that houses some storage and sits attached to your network so that the volume is accessible to all of the machines connected. It’s a relatively simple concept, but it tends to be one of those things that a lot of users simply haven’t encountered. Netgear’s Stora boasts a 1TB drive, with space for another 1TB drive if you feel the need to expand it.

For those who haven’t used a NAS before, it’s an ideal way to keep media (whether music or movies) on a centralised drive that’s accessible to every machine on your network. Moreover, as long as you’re not too fussed about having all of your media accessible when you’re out and about, it’s also an excellent way to keep your PCs’ drives free of clutter.

Thanks to the fact that the drive is easily accessible via your local network, you’ll also be able to run backups of your notebook via your wireless network (software permitting), which is probably the closest you’ll get to a totally hassle-free backup experience.

You can also use the option to add another drive to the mix to make your backup that bit more reliable. Since the Stora offers RAID1 support directly, you can generally rely on your backup (or whatever you care to store on it) to be very well looked after indeed, unless there’s some totally catastrophic failure… or a fire.

Netgear’s Stora is down to €164.32 this week, with a 1TB hard drive already in there.

If you’d like to throw in an extra 1TB hard disk, then you could always pick up Samsung’s SpinPoint F3, which will set you back around €77.

Iomega Launches “Smart” NAS

Iomega has launched the iConnect Wireless Data Station which it bills as a “powerful and yet inexpensive device” that provides a simple way to bring all of your USB storage into your network, allowing you to connect, share and access files anywhere, including over the Internet.

So far we only have a US price ($79) but it’s available worldwide from next month and for those sick of copious wires everywhere this should put a dent in that problem at the very least. The rub of the green is that once you pocket the pretty darn light (there’s no onboard storage so it’s a handy size) iConnect, you then hook it to your router in either a wired or wireless configuration, and it’s as easy as plugging external USB drives or USB Flash drives into any of the four USB ports on the device, making the drives automatically connected to and accessible from any computer on your network or remotely via the web.

You Decide What We Discount… Vote For Komplett’s Next Special Offer

We want to offer you the chance to have a say in our weekly special offers, and so we’re going to offer up four products (below), showing their current price and the discounted price, and let all of you out there decide which will be our Day Breaker next Tuesday, 8 December. This is something that we’d like to start making a regular feature of, if you guys and gals out there think it’s worthwhile and popular enough.

You can vote one of a number of ways: You can leave a comment on our blog, reply to us on boards.ie, or if you follow us on Twitter or Facebook then you can drop us a message to either of those. One vote per person (and this is the social network, so we’ll figure it out if you’re stuffing the ballot… And come get you ;-), though feel free to tell your friends and family about the offer – indeed, we’d be much obliged if you would. The more people this reaches, the more people get involved in our decision making processes for deals and products, the better we think it will be for everyone looking to shop with us now and in the future.

The products up for vote this week are:

Click through to see our page for the LG 22-inch display 🙂

LG 22” Full-HD Monitor W2253V, SKU 462227. Current price: €189.50 Discount price: €169 Saving: €20 / 10%

Click through to see our page for the Netgear Stora 🙂

Netgear Stora Home NAS 1TB, SKU 496965. Current price: €198 Discount Price: €159 Saving: €39 / 19%

Click through to see our page for the Samsun 40-inch HDTV

Samsung 40” LCD-TV LE40B550, SKU 574061. Current price: 686.99 (679+7.99PRF) Discount price: 614.99 (607+7.99PRF) Saving: €72 / 10%

Click through to see our page for the Seagate Barracuda 500GB 🙂

Seagate Barracuda 500GB Hard Drive, SKU 430708. Current price: 50 Discount price: 40 Saving: €10 / 20%

So, get voting!

Product Spotlight – Netgear Stora

Good afternoon all, hopefully today has been a bit kinder to everyone than yesterday… though given the weather it’s likely been one drawn out tragedy. It’s like the beginning of Macbeth.

Click through to see our product page for the Netgear Stora 🙂

Anyway, griping about the football aside, for those who don’t often read the blog, once a week we like to do a Product Spotlight post, where the staff at Komplett.ie get to make a recommendation on something we think doesn’t really get the hype it deserves. This week, that product is Netgear’s Stora, which is essentially a network attached storage (NAS) setup.

The strange thing about NAS is that, despite people buying mountains of capacity from us, in the form of 1TB externals as much as anything internal or USB powered, a lot of people really don’t seem to be aware that there are NAS devices out there that would often suit their needs better than a simple external drive.

In simplest terms, Netgear’s Stora is very much like an external enclosure into which you can throw two external drives. It then attaches directly to your network, showing the drives (or drive, if you just want to roll with one) as a network share, accessible to anyone you want to let onto your local network. That makes it ideal for anyone who might be considering picking up a nice big external to store their media on; there’s nothing like throwing everything onto an external to free up space, but still having ready access to it at all times as though it were plugged in whenever you’re in the house.

Special Offers – Week of November 16th

Good afternoon all, I hope you’re all well. For those who had asked over the weekend and during the day, I’m very much recovered since last week, thanks for your concern 🙂 Anyway, for those who aren’t used to how the Monday afternoon blog post, we tend to post the special offers we have at the start of the week. It gives everyone the maximum possible time to consider picking something up while it’s reduced.

This week we have special offers on a netbook, a graphics card and a home NAS setup.

Asus EEE PC 1000HD:

Asus is fairly widely credited with having been one of the manufacturers that really got behind netbooks in a big way before they were fashionable. That means that Asus has been in the netbook game a lot longer than most other manufacturers, and it shows over some of the competition.

Click through to see our page for the Asus EEE PC 1000HD 🙂

The EEE PC 1000HD has long been one of the standards by which other netbooks are measured. It boasts a solid 10.1″ case, a 900MHz Intel Celeron M processor, 1GB of RAM, a 1.3 Megapixel webcam and a 3-in-1 card reader, for those who absolutely must upload photos on the go.

It’s also got 160GB of hard drive space, which means you won’t be too tight for space if you like watching a bit of video on a machine you can carry around with you without too much trouble.

The Asus EEE PC 1000HD is knocked down by just under 10% this week to €255. As ever with netbooks, it’s ideal for students looking for something nice and light to take notes on without breaking the bank, especially considering the scrapes students tend to get into with hardware 😉

For more details, you can check out our product page for the Asus EEE 1000HD.

I feel like this would be a dreadful time to point out that it’s National Tollerance Day, but in any case, The ASUS EEE 1000HD is also available in white.

How To: Get Your Digital Media to Your TV

We get asked a lot about getting digital media from a PC or a piece of large-scale digital storage directly onto a nice, big display. Generally, these questions come from people looking to get their high-definition content onto their HDTV. With that in mind, we’re going to go through a few of the different ways to get some content from your PC to your TV without any big headaches.

We’ll start with dedicated devices and then work from there, but basically there are about three or four fairly easy ways to get your video library from your hard drive to your TV without burning a mountain of DVDs, which is (let’s face it) both awkward and honestly feels a bit transient.

Dedicated Media Player:

The first option, by far the easiest in terms of technical skill needed to get everything together, is to just pick up a dedicated media player. The whole thing needn’t take longer than the time it takes to copy across all of your media, though the down side is that you’ll need to sort yourself out with both a media player and storage (if you go with some of the more popular media players).

By far the most popular media player we sell is Western Digital’s WD TV HD Media Player. It’s nice and simple, all you need to do is plug it into the display itself (HDMI ports would be ideal), plug in an external drive and you’re ready to go. The WD TV comes highly recommended and very well reviewed. Moreover, we’ve now got the Western Digital TV Mini too, though it outputs at DVD quality rather than in HD.

To quote the folks from TrustedReviews, “… while we’ve come across all sorts of variations on the ‘getting my multimedia stored on my computer to play on my living room TV’ theme, this is the first that has taken such a simple and effective approach”

Of course, you’ll need to grab some extra storage if you pick it up. Normally we recommend that people consider very carefully whether they’ll get the use out of a drive that will have to be plugged into a wall socket, but given the fact that the drive will likely be in near-continuous use in the same place, so it’s nowhere near as big an issue.

Special Offers – Week of October 19th

Good afternoon all, hopefully Monday finds you guys as well as it does us. For those of you who aren’t familiar with our Monday afternoon blog posts, we try to get up a post every Monday to detail the special offers we’ll have for the week. We like to get it up at the start of the week to give people as long as possible to weigh up their options 🙂

Anyway, without getting bogged down in all that, this week we have a gorgeous set of wireless Sennheiser headphones, a Netgear’s NAS setup, and a PowerColor Radeon HD 5870.

Sennheiser Headset RS 120:

Sennheiser has an excellent, and thoroughly deserved, reputation for excellent quality, both in terms of the physical build of a product and the sound reproduction its devices manage. Sennheiser’s RS 120 is one of the most elegant wireless setups going.

Click through to see our page for Sennheiser's RS120 🙂

Sennheiser’s RS 120 itself is an excellent setup, elegantly constructed (much as it might look a little cluttered in the image) once you’ve separated it from the charging loop. Essentially, they behave like any other high-quality set of wireless headphones, only when you need to charge them you just hand the headphones themselves on the charge loop, at which point the metal conducts precious charge to your battery.

If nothing else, it’s among the most convenient charging setups for any headset going and finally removes all of the fiddly cables from the arrangement (barring the one that you use to plug in the charging loop). It’s an excellent arrangement.

Sennheiser’s RS 120 is down to €62 this week, which is a nice, round 10% off. They’re a superb piece of kit, well worth checking out.