For 3.5 years, this has been a one-woman show. Except for the nuts and bolts that my host company handles, everything else on this site is done by me! Ack–it’s a lot of work.

And with increased readership comes increased emails to respond to, as well as multiple social media sites to tend to and so on. It’s been very difficult these past few weeks to still bring you the normal weekly stuff I do and try to include holiday and Black Friday/Cyber Monday stuff.

Luckily, I have great friends who are also great at finding deals. Say hello to Heather and Courtney! Heather is also a southern Chester county resident and knows all the same stores I do. Courtney lives in New Jersey and among other interests, is the HCW moderator for ShopRite. Additonally another local friend, Laura, may be picking up some stray things here & there.

Right now, I’m still working out some bugs with my host company to get them their own IDs on here, so just look for who signed off on the post.

Hopefully this will enable us to bring you all the Smart Spending tips!

Here’s a fun infographic on toys, thought you’d all enjoy it! Getting you ready for Black Friday 2011.

This message has been brought to you by our friends at Black Friday 2011. Check out their Target Black Friday ad and 1800 Flowers coupon.

The gadgets advertised in Black Friday door-buster deals don’t always stand up to close inspection. You never know what’s inside unless you can read the fine print on those Cyber Monday laptop deals. Sometimes, manufacturers try to liquidate overstock laptops with outdated features, but those can still be a good deal if you know what to look for:

• Memory: Look for 2 -3 GB of RAM, minimum, hopefully with additional capacity for later upgrades.
• Hard drive: 40 GB hard drives can get filled up quickly. Look for at least 250 GB.
• Connection ports: Two or more USB ports will let you connect plenty of devices. HDMI is an added bonus if you want to port HD movies from your computer to a larger screen.
• Webcam: A built-in webcam is a good indication of a feature-rich computer, letting you make video calls and recordings.
• Operating System: Windows 7 currently dominates on new laptops. Lesser laptops might leave you stuck with Windows Vista (generally panned by critics as inferior) or not even include OS software.

If you pay attention to the countdowns on Black Friday deals, make sure you know how that actually translates into real-time in your time zone. Keep in mind, also, that a lot of sales are pushing back their start-times earlier this year; some sales are even starting on Thursday night. You don’t want to log on, trying to find a stellar deal on a laptop, only to find that the sale opened early and the good models are all gone.

So, know what to look for. Sign up for RSS feeds and alerts on Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. And good luck on hunting down those coveted deals!

Author Byline: David works with Dell and enjoys writing about technology, computers, and saving money.

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This was brought to you by our friends at Dell.