How to create a better office environment with furniture, supplies, and products

I got a good chuckle out of Aaron Goldberg's account of his quest to purchase $450 laptops for each of his three children. After having no luck with online dealers, he decided to brave the hometown computer store during a back-to-school sale...

It was a "no sales tax" weekend in our home state of Massachusetts, so on a Sunday, we went to the stores. The crowds made it appear as if it was an "everything is free" day! It was the Christmas rush times ten! Twenty minutes of full-contact shopping later, I got to the store's computer section. By physically blocking the path of a blue-shirted sales rep, I got his attention and told him I wanted three of the $450 Compaq laptops that were on sale. He laughed at me with the maniacal eyes of an overcaffeinated madman who must have worked 48 hours straight, and said, "We don't have any laptops left under $800, and you'll have to wait 30 minutes to buy one of those."

Read the full saga of PC Magazine Real World Testing: Can You Really Buy a $450 PC? and find out if he finally was able to purchase the laptops within his assigned budget.