JDPFu.com 2025

Got dressed early this morning, drove to the local quickie mart and bought the VERY thin AJC newspaper this morning. See, I haven’t bought a newspaper in about 20 years, so I wasn’t certain that this tiny, thin thing was the version I needed, the version with the Fry’s Tax Free Holiday Sale Ad in it. Abdullah said that was the normal paper. I quickly flipped looking for the Fry’s ad – didn’t obviously see this main item of my quest, but bought it anyway. The AJC doesn’t put commercial ads online, which sucks. Other cities have Fry’s Electronics Ads online, but not Atlanta.

Got home … and started searching the ad group. Nothing. Started flipping pages, 1 by 1 hoping for at least a half page ad with motherboards, CPUs, etc…. eureka! An insert that didn’t look like an ad insert, but was more than just a few pages – 8 pgs! Excited, I grab my morning tea and start flipping anxiously through those wonderful pages looking for the components to build a new PC. TVs … keyboards …. laptops, monitors, cameras, printers … ah – RAM! The RAM I need – at a good price, but not a great price. Then GPSs, vacuums, software and games. Are these tax free? 1 hard drive too small and slow to be considered. A few non-interesting motherboard/CPU combos and telephones. Eh.

No relevant CPUs, motherboards, power supplies, or great RAM deals. No trip to Fry’s needed today.

I want my $0.75 back.

See, in previous years, I’ve been able to build an entire PC for $100 less than normal using Fry’s ads on the tax free weekend. This year, I won’t even make the 45 minute drive to visit the store. Sure they had 8GB USB thumb drives for $19, but not the type that spreads access across multiple internal bays to make them last longer and be much faster. Nothing of real interest or a deal I can’t pass up.

At least I’ll get to sip my tea slowly this morning as I build an order from NewEgg and Amazon. Microcenter didn’t appear to have any deals either. A motherboard I found for $109 at newegg was $145 at Microcenter. Sorry guys.

To add more injury – the Fry’s in other cities have Intel Core 2 Quad Processor Q9400 & Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P Motherboard – exactly the deal I want. EXACTLY. Too bad it isn’t available local ‘cause they’d already have my money.

We’ve all had to learn about disappointment in our lives. Today was just a small reminder.