Take it from me, man: never get your hopes up for a back-to-school sale. Last August, when somebody told me that Office Mart was selling notebooks for 19 cents, I thought – well, I didn’t think. That was the problem. I expected something like the Hewlett Packard Pavillion dv5117cl Notebook PC. A 1.8GHz AMD Turion 64 Mobile Processor, 1024MB DDR memory, an 80GB hard drive, a double-layer DVD read/write drive, a 15” widescreen display, integrated 802.11b/g wireless – I’d pay 19 cents for that. Hell, maybe even a quarter.

I should’ve known something was wrong when I didn’t see a line out the door. Why weren’t people taking advantage of this incredible deal? Still, full of hope, I jangled the change in my pocket in anticipation of turning those coins into a sweet HP Pavilion. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that these so-called notebooks were just stacks of paper held together by a piece of wire. Wide-rule, even!

After my fainting spell had passed, I thought it through: if that HP Pavilion was as great as I’d thought, maybe it was worthing paying a little more for one from an online discount retailer. So I did, and me and my Pavilion have never looked back. The lesson is, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And if it sounds just good enough to be true, it’s probably the Hewlett Packard Pavillion dv5117cl Notebook PC.

Back to top