When I get money from advertising I generally spend it on getting a new product to review. This time around I got the Wacom Bamboo pen and touch. I was looking for something that could give my wrist some alternative motion instead of using my mouse all the time, but from experience I didn't want to use my full 12 inch Wacom pen tablet for everyday use.
I waited for the Apple iPad to be announced prior to reviewing this product. As I knew I would get several questions on how it compares to it. However to my surprise the iPad had far less features and functionality than I was expecting, making the Asus T91MT in a class further above the iPad.
The T91MT is a convertable netbook, that turns into a tablet. It features a touch screen that also has multi touch functionality, allowing for pinch, zoom and scroll right on the screen without using the mouse or included stylus.
The stylus included has a small magnet built into it for putting the computer to sleep with a wave of the stylus, and helping to hold it in place inside the body of the netbook. While the screen is com...
Without a doubt Blackberry devices are probably the most backwards and unfriendly I have ever seen. That might seem like an odd claim, but think about it think about how all the other manufacturer's are inovating right now, then look at RIM and the Blackberry.
The Blackberry is the only smart phone I know of that does not have full builtin support for microsoft exchange. Instead of selecting a server type and then putting your settings in, you need to do one of the following: Buy software for your exchange server, or an application for your desktop.
It makes no sense to do this! Sure you can connect to send email, but your contacts, tasks, and calendar won't hit your phone otherwise. The Palm Pre, and iPhone do this all a...
I have the great option of owning a Palm Pre, and getting to work with iPhones on an almost daily basis. So I often get asked which device I prefer, which one is the better phone the Pre or the iPhone. Obviously this is something that is going to be more based on opinion, as there are only a few things hardware wise that seperate them. So I'll get those out of the way and then get to the more opinion based comparisons.
Networks
Winner: Pre
Google has released Chrome OS in beta form for developer preview and testing. I have managed to get ahold of a copy in virtual machine disk format to review. Now let's get something right immediately here. The Chrome OS is still in beta (pre beta I would really say), and is in no way intended for everyday use. As a result alot of the things I point out here may change or not even exist in the end product. However one thing I do know for sure is the purpose of the OS itself. Google has made it clear that the Chrome OS is intended for specially designed netbooks, and will be for browsing the internet only. Meaning there will be no high end desktops, or CPU intense applications such as video editors.
In my opinion I find the concept...
When you think of sound cards, the first name that comes to mind is Sound Blaster. Why should'nt it? The quality of sound these cards produce is great compared to many others.
However when you think of support the last name you are going to think of is Creative Labs, the company that makes the Sound blaster series of cards.
I have used their cards for years, and at one point even had a graphics card they made. I obviously stopped buying their graphics cards because of the poor support, but yet I still stuck with their sound cards.
I love the audio quality, and most importantly I love the full front panel controls they give on the high end models. I also understand that a company cannot support a product forever, s...
If your system no longer starts windows, you can still recover your files before you reload the system. All you need is an Ultimate boot CD, and an external hard drive.
What you need to do this is a couple of things
An ultimate boot CD
An external hard drive to store your recovered files onto
With these two items you can start up your system and copy your files safely to your external drive for safe keeping, or to copy back onto a new computer, etc. The first thing you will want to do is set your system to boot from a CD (Check the first video below). Then you can place your Ultimate boot CD in the system and start from there.
I recomm...
Probably the most powerful tool built into Windows is the registry editor. As Spiderman's uncle said... "With great power comes great responsibility!" The registry editor is nothing to kid around with. With it you can change or create virtually any software or hardware setting on your system directly. However if you delete or set something incorrectly Windows won't complain until it's too late.
So before you start fooling with the registry editor, watch my video on it and learn a bit about how the tool works first. Then once you are ready, open the registry editor and make a backup of your entire registry. As I said before, and I say again, You can easily stop windows from working by setting a value wrong! This can caus...
Now that all your computer components are combined you now have Voltron! Defender of the universe... or just a computer that needs to be started up, one or the other. Chances are the later, so we have a few things to do before we actually turn this thing on.
First make sure that all your connections are solid and in place, and that everything is screwed in. We have one fan connector to hook up from the hard drive power cable, and remember to install the extra USB connector on the back panel if you want it. Now you will want to start planning how to put your wires out of the way. Normally you do this prior to hooking everything up, but In this case we do not have any way to route the c...
After getting all your parts together we can now we can get to the fun part! Assembling your computer one step at a time.
The physical process like I said before I pretty easy, but so you know what to expect here is the quick run down on it all:
We already preped the case for parts
Install the motherboard
Installation of the Processor
Install the power supply
Install the RAM
Install the CD Drive
Installing the Hard drive
Installing the Graphics/Video card
Then we can boot for the first time and install the operating system.
For each step I have a video below that goes into more detail....
Building your own computer is not as difficult as you may think. The reality of the situation is that putting the parts together is very easy. The only tricky part is making sure that all the parts would work together. That comes with experience and research, and that's for another set of videos altogether. This series will show you how to physically get all the components in a computer together, to build a working unit.
If you have never built a computer before and want to give it a try let me recommend that you find a current example online, and read or watch it a couple times before starting. Further I would recommend buying the same parts that are in the example video/document so that you can follow along easily.
In t...
Having used Seagate drives for years I have found them to be pretty reliable, however in the last year or two I have started to encounter issues with them. Most notabily with the SMART data features of the drive.
For those of you who do not know, SMART data is a section on your hard drive designed to record information in regards to it's performace. In this you can find things such as the number of seek errors, drive memory errors, bad sector counts, etc, etc. This is great as you can look at the SMART data and know if the drive is starting to go bad, before it actually does go bad.
The problem with Seagate drives and this is that they don't use standard SMART data, they kinda just do their own thing.
If you use a...
The Kingston SNV225-S2 provides excellent performance for the buck compared to other SSD models of the same speed. I purchased this 64GB model for around $160 at the time, and according to the specificiations it should get around 220mbs read, and 140mbs write speed.
Just like other SSD drives I've seen this one comes in a 2.5 inch mobile format. I do question as to if making these drives in a standard 3.5 inch format would provide more storage for less cost, as some people like myself will be using these in desktop systems.
The casing of the drive is metal as I would expect it to be, and besides it's performance there is really nothing else to note. Feel free to watch my video review to see the drive in action.
I'm changing the way the company is heading and I need your feedback to do it!
With so many things going on at the moment for me, the work I do has changed. So the result of this is either come across a big bucket of cash, or re-invent the business. I'm optioning for the re-inventing of the business...
So I need your help in figuring out where I should focus my efforts for this. I plan to focus on online content, but where exactly should I drive that focus to for the best result... Hmm... The answer is to where the viewer wants to see content.
So embedded below is survey, or you can make with the clicky clicky here to the Google form.
Remember your feedback is alway...
There are a multitude of thermal products on the market, and some better than others. I actually use two different products depending on the job itself.
First is what I call a replacement grade thermal grease. What I mean by this is that I will use it when I am out in the field working on a system under warranty, or in general on site. It's almost as good as the higher end grease, but the key thing I look for here is ease of application. I don't want to be onsite for an additional 15 minutes or more just getting an exact thickness or coating. Plus I want to use whatever is closest to the original manufacturer's specs.
Artic Silver 5 meets this requirement very well. It's a great thermal compound, and will often make a sys...
The short of it, bang for the buck the Xacti VPC-CG10 has more features than other video cameras in it's price range. That's exactly why I purchased it when I needed to upgrade my video camera for The Noc. I did'nt have much (or really any) money to spend on a camera, but needed something that was going to shoot in HD and mount to a tripod.
Doing some searching for HD video cameras I found several in the $400 and up range that would give me great quality, and everything I needed. However that was out of my price range, and I was wondering what the lower end market might offer.
So after looking over some models I found the Xacti on Amazon for around $175 at the time (Link below if you wan...
Adobe has managed time and time again to tick me off with software activations. Well it's time someone else besides me gets to know what these problems are. Honestly it's getting to a point I will likely use another photo editing product when CS4 gets too old.
What's the problem you ask?
The problem is that with Adobe's new activation system you can only activate your software on two computers, and that's fine with me. But where this breaks down is the activation system itself. You have to actually DEactivate your old installation to move it to a new computer. If you don't you will install it on another computer fine, but then be told that you can only use it as a trial version until you activate it.
Now let's see...
If you are serious about removing a virus from your computer these days, you need to have some serious tools. Viruses and spyware these days come out so fast they can break right past even the best antivirus products, and are crafted so they merge and become a part of your operating system. Scanning your system after getting infected does not always remove an infection, and to those who don't have the know how or tools will have to reload their system, or take it to a repair shop to be cleaned.
In most cases if an antivirus or spyware product cannot remove the virus while windows is running, you can use a boot cd to startup in a safe copy of windows and remove the virus. The reason this works is because you are taking out the vir...
If you ever had a system that was running a bit slow you might have thought about simply adding more ram to it, however that is not always the fix. Using some tools like process explorer and task manager can help you determine if your performance issue is due to lack of RAM, or another issue.
Some people have asked me where I purchase my equipment and parts from that I use in fixing all these computers.
Well when it comes to off the shelf parts like power supplies, ram, cases, cd drives, etc. I usually purchase them through NewEgg.com . The irony is that I do have deals with distributors, but because I do not order hundreds of parts at a time New Egg is almost always cheaper by $10 or more per part. I will also use them for most of my pre made cable needs as well.
When it comes to ordering licenses for software such as Trend Micro I stick with my distributors because they can give me raw license pric...
