Office Depot to offer $99 PC with $99 shipping

The bargain season for back-to-school shopping begins next week, but read the fine print.

Office Depot will sell a Hewlett-Packard desktop PC complete with a CRTmonitor and printer for $99. The bundle, which typically sells for$429, involves a $100 in-store instant rebate and four mail-in coupons. Still, you have to have the machine shipped, and shipping comes to $99.

On the flip side, consumers don't need to sign up for new Internetservice as part of the deal. Other companies and stores have offered$99 computers before, but these deals often required consumers to buy a year's worth of AOL dial-up service or open an account with some other Internet service provider.

The Office Depot computer comes with a Celeron D 352 chip, an 80GB hard drive and 256MB of memory. The offer is good from Sept. 3 through 9.

News source: CNET News.com