AOL giving away 200 free laptops in UK cities

The Carphone Warehouse has come up with a novel way to promote an AOL broadband special offer - give away 200 Dell laptops completely gratis. The company has said it will 'set free' a total of 200 brand-new Dell laptops in Newcastle, Manchester, Birmingham and Southampton tomorrow, 6 September.

The 'fortunate finders' will get the laptop which they will then have to register at their local Carphone Warehouse to also get a free two years-worth of broadband.

The move is designed to promote Carphone's AOL Broadband "free laptop" offer - sign up to AOL for two years and you'll get a laptop. The chain says it is extending this previously-announced offer to the first 200,000 people subscribing to AOL Broadband in store.

All the Dell machine feature an Intel Celeron 540 processor, 15.4-inch widescreen, 1GB RAM, 80 GB hard drive, Microsoft Vista Home Basic, a DVD-RW 8x Optical Drive and Wi-Fi.

Observational skills

Carphone says the 200 winners will need to be "observant", but we can't see the company simply leaving the laptops in the park as its photography (above) suggests.

"This is us literally 'setting 200 Dell laptops free' to passers-by. The reason for doing something so bold is that we really want to revolutionise broadband use in the UK and make it accessible to each and every one of us - freeing Britons from the constraints of wired technology," said Charles Dunstone, CEO of The Carphone Warehouse.