Any suggestion people? I'm looking for a cheap, reliable support and fast activation/ transfer domain registrar. Thanks in advance.

I haven't had any problems with namecheap.com and godaddy.com. Had a small issue with registerfly.com ...they answer support tickets in 1day-7days (atleast for me).
You can also look for coupons that give you special pricing. Registerfly has special offers once in a while (3$ / .net / year - .60$ / info / year)

there is several threads talks about the same subject, you may want to search and read others experiences

Currently I'm going with NetFirms.com which is priced at USD 4.XX. Anyone has any registrar which are offering lower than this?

Yahoo. $1.99 for the first year.

However, they are NOT recommended.

Another (NOT recommended, just-for-the-sake-of-answering-the-question) cheapie domain name registrar is ******.com (http://www.******.com/?domainonly) for $1.95/first year.

Pay no attention to the endorsement by Screech, lol.

I have experience with Netfirms. They are cheap but for some unknown reason, all of my sites registered with netfirms were used go down so often even when many other sites on the same server were running very smooth. Yahoo is 1.99. Other registrar that I've used and found good are Omnis and Stargate. Even though its not about good registrar's but you have to go for better one rather than saving a few dollars.

Do a search on NetFirm on these forms before going with them.

I use GoDaddy for most of my domains because I get two months of shared hosting and the domain for $10 (they have a promo where you get $1.99 domains if you get web hosting, and you can also use coupon "SAVETEN" to save ten percent on you purchase total).