While deals can be had at brick and mortar stores, you have to know what you are looking for. You are usually better off buying online (and hopefully saving sales tax) especially when stack-able coupons appear.
There are sites devoted to finding such deals for you. gotapex.com is one such site, telling you the deal, when it expires, coupons codes to apply, and suggested upgrades that are value priced. Others to look at are techdeals.net and slickdeals.net. But you have to act fast, companies will raise the price if an item is selling fast.
When comparing deals you need to be aware of the processor. Here are the processor names in order of power.
Atom, Celeron, Pentium, Pentium Dual Core, Core 2 Duo, i3, i5, i7.
3GB of memory is also the minimum you should get as well as Windows 7 Home Premium.
Common tricks to lower the price of the laptop are to install Windows 7 Starter or Basic edition and include 2 GB of memory.
When you have to pick between one or the other, always take more memory over a larger hard drive. Always take a 2 processor category improvement over memory. (So a i3 with 2GB memory is better than a Pentium Dual Core with 3GB memory for the same price)
There are other items to consider such as video cards, but you aren't doing anything with the laptop to dictate having that sway your choice as the included options will most likely always be just fine for you.
