Walking down 7th Avenue in New York City today, I passed by one of those shady electronics stores -- you know, the ones with the two-year-old gadgets and improbable signs in the windows? The ones where you wonder how they stay in business, and you pity the poor suckers who get snookered into shopping there?

This place had a terrific display of 3-4 Ghz Intel Pentium laptops in the front window, including this gem, an Averatec 3715, advertised as running a 4-Ghz Intel Pentium Extreme Edition processor. The problem is:

1) Intel doesn't make a 4-Ghz Pentium EE processor.

2) Even if they did, it would actually cause a thin-and-light laptop to spontaneously combust.

3) This laptop has an AMD Sempron 3000+ processor, as the factory label in the lower right corner explains.

The lesson, of course, is that the only person who should be visiting these kinds of stores is Eliot Spitzer and his crew of G-Men. Though I was tempted by the Toshiba Libretto subnotebook with the 3 Ghz Pentium D processor they were advertising. I might be able to cook breakfast on top of that.