Amazon.com’s Game Sale

While it’s not exactly a door buster, Amazon.com is having a huge sale on video games, buy one, get another game at 50% off. This includes some of the top rated game titles of the year, like Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (sure to be a best seller this holiday season), Modern Warfare 3, and Rage.

Sharp LC42B45U

While it’s certainly not the best HDTV available (and it is a bit out dated), Best Buy will be selling this 42-inch 1080p LCD TV for a mere $200. This will be one of the items that sells out fast. Remember, doors open at 12am on Friday.

Best Buy Laptops Sales

Another Best Buy door buster, the Samsung RV510 is a pretty capable 15.6-inch laptop with 4GB of RAM and 320GB hard drive. At just $300, it’s certainly a steal. There will also be a 15.6-inch Lenovo Ideapad G575 for $180. It’s a little less powerful, featuring only 2GB of RAM and a smaller 250GB hard drive, but the price is right.

Best Buy Camera Sales

Best Buy will have a handful of digital cameras on sale as well. The most popular will probably be the Canon PowerShot A3300 at $90; however, they EOS Rebel T3i will be marked down slightly, too. Sony’s NEX-5 will be only $500, which is a phenomenal price, though you may want to consider holding off for the NEX-5N instead.

Netgear WNDR3400

If you don’t make it in time for the door busters, the WNDR3400 is an excellent consolation prize, and Best Buy will have it for $60, USB wireless adapter included.

Target

Target is doing something a little interesting this year. Instead of cutthroat deals, Target’s sale prices are a little higher than you’d expect, however, many of its sale items include Target gift cards. For instance, they will be offering a Keurig K-Cup coffee brewer (a very popular item this year) at its usual $80, but it will include a $30 Target gift card. Other gift card combos include the iPod Nano and Beats by Dr. DreSolo Headphones.

Times Are Changing

If you’re not the type to camp out in the cold just for a chance at a killer deal, you’ll likely be happy to hear that many stores are changing the way they do their Black Friday sales. They still have their door buster specials, but the sales seem to get less impressive each year. Instead, many stores are opting to run their sales longer, but with less discounts. This means you can find a lot of Black Friday priced items often a week before Black Friday.

And don’t forget about Cyber Monday, the internet’s equivalent of Black Friday. Cyber Monday starts on the Monday immediately following Black Friday, but keep an eye out before then. Just like the brick and mortar stores, online stores sometimes like to start early.

Wireless B, G, and N

There are three common wireless network types: 802.11b, 802.11g, and 802.11n. Since the 802.11 portion simply refers to wireless in general, these networks are usually just called by their alphabetical counterparts; B, G, and N.

Both Wireless B and G networks have been around for years, and virtually every wireless router on the market (and Wi-Fi devices) supports both of these networks. Of the two, Wireless-G is by far the most common, but because Wireless-N routers support B and G devices, you should consider a Wireless-N router.

If you expect to do any extensive file sharing or HD video streaming, the speed limitations of Wireless-G could be troublesome. Wireless-N is the latest and fastest of all the wireless network types. It is capable of transfer speeds up to 300Mbps. The downside is that your devices will need to be Wireless-N as well to take advantage of the speed increase. Most Wireless-N routers provide Wireless B and G coverage as well, so if you have a mixture of N and G devices, they’ll all still be able to connect. The D-Link DIR-655 makes an excellent choice for a basic, fast Wireless-N router.

Dual-Band Routers

Dual-Band routers are fairly new to the market. The 802.11n standard allows the network to use either a 2.4GHz or 5.0GHz transmission frequency, and dual-band routers allow you to use both frequencies and reduce interference. Not all dual-band routers are equal though. Only routers that allow for “Simultaneous Dual-Band” allow you to use both frequencies at once. Other routers, like the Linksys E2000 and WRT320N, can only use one at a time, defaulting to 2.4GHz any time a non-5.0GHz device is connected. Also, keep in mind that many Wireless-N devices only support the 2.4GHz frequency.

Ideally, you’ll want to set up a dual-band network with devices that are transferring a lot of data to one another on separate bands. For example, if you have a Wi-Fi TV that you stream HD videos to from your laptop, you’ll want to connect the laptop to the 5.0GHz band and the TV to the 2.4GHz band. Being on separate bands essentially doubles your transfer rate. The Netgear WNDR3400 is an affordable, simultaneous Dual-Band router with nearly every feature a router can offer, though if you have several wired devices to connect, you may want to consider the Netgear WNDR3700 or Linksys E3000, which both offer the same features as the WNDR3400 but with the added benefit of 1Gbps Ethernet ports (versus 100Mbps).

Wireless Encryption

You don’t want neighbors (or worse, hackers) sneaking onto your network. Encrypting your Wi-Fi protects against this. Originally, we had WEP encryption, which used 10 or 26 character alphanumeric codes as passwords. The latest encryption method is WPA2 (aka WPA with AES), which is much stronger than WEP and uses traditional passphrases (far easier to remember). When setting up your own Wi-Fi network, it’s best to use WPA2 encryption with a Pre-Shared Key.