Bargain laptops...

…just might be a hot item this holiday shopping season. Online and in its stores, Wal-Mart just started selling a $398 Compaq with “a 15.4-inch screen, a 3300+ Sempron processor from Advanced Micro Devices that churns at 2.0GHz, a 60GB hard drive and 512MB of memory,” CNET reports. It also has a $598 Toshiba on sale, and Dell is selling a $499 notebook on its site. CNET suggests the trend is laptops as individual rather than family purchase – “everyone in the family is getting their own machine.”