At the Best Buy, Lauren browses the notebook aisles, and finally settles on a Hewlett-Packard Co. system, a .

"This one has all my qualifications, I'm gonna buy this one," Lauren says as she points to the Pavilion. At the checkout, she crows: " I got everything for under $1,000!"

The ad debuted Thursday night on CBS during the network's broadcast of the NCAA basketball tournament, but clips can be found on the Internet, including YouTube.

"People are looking at price," said Stephen Baker, a retail analyst with The NPD Group Inc., when asked what he thought of the new ad. "Consumers today, unlike a year ago perhaps, don't care about value if value comes at an additional cost," said Baker. "And this ad highlights Microsoft's competitive advantage today. They highlighted the value proposition of Windows versus Mac."

But Baker cautioned against equating value and price. "The woman's wasn't looking at the different value propositions, she was looking at the price," he said. "Some people are confusing the two."