Archive for the 'Hardware' Category

The Flip video recorder is a compact little device that makes recording videos a snap. Bundled with the device is software that streamlines the process of publishing or sharing your videos. The Flip makes a great companion when you’d like to capture a moment, but there are some aspects that could be improved.

This article compares display quality of two budget-priced 1080p HD-DVD options, the Toshiba HD-A20 standalone player, and the Xbox 360 HD-DVD add-on drive. Results cover regular DVD upconversion performance, as well as HD-DVD results from Transformers and King Kong.

The Nikon S7c is one of the latest digital cameras to include WiFi capabilities. The 7.1 Megapixel camera sports a 3x zoom, 3-inch LCD, and a stylish design, but let’s not kid ourselves. The WiFi is the reason this camera is so attractive.

Google Calendar allows you to use SMS, to remotely interact with your calendar.

This is extremely handy for when you are away from the computer, and/or an internet connection, and you need to either check your events for the day, or add future events for another day.

If you use text messages a lot on your mobile phone, you can easily interact with you calendar:

• Check today’s events.
• Check tomorrow’s events.

Unfortunately the preferred file systems for Windows XP and Mac OS X do not permit users to read and write data between each other. NTFS is the recommend file system on Windows XP and HFS+ is the preferred file system on OS X. Recent versions of OS X will read NTFS partitioned disks, but will not write to the partition. I have a PC and Mac, but my PC is my primary machine. I want one disk drive that I can swap between my Windows and OS X computers, so I found the overall easiest solution to be a Mac-formatted FAT32 single-partition external disk drive.

Is the Antec NSK2400 the perfect case for your home theater PC?

The story surrounding this router is an interesting one. The WRT54G is a consumer level router with a wireless access point that has been selling “literally hundreds of thousands per month” according to an article at Linux Devices. The router has been through several versions (around 6 major versions) as Linksys has tweaked the hardware and software. Recently Linksys has decreased the hardware performance of the WRT54G while leaving the product name unchanged, confusing and arguably, cheating consumers.

Small form factor (SFF) cases are inherently warmer and noisier, but arguably possess more “cool” factor due to pleasing aesthetics and space efficiency. Lian-Li is a Chinese computer case vendor that has gained a reputation within the PC builder community for high-quality, stylish aluminum cases. The PC-V300 is a great product for Lian-Li as it incorporates the great build quality and pleasing aesthetics that the company has become known for. I recently rebuilt my PC inside this case and have prepared a review of the case and the build experience.

High-definition television has been rolling out across the United States over the last several years, slowly penetrating the US television market. My experience is that the average US Midwest consumer finds the monthly cost of HD programming from cable companies like Comcast to be quite expensive, and the content that is available in high-definition sparse. Over-the-air (OTA) tuners offer a few channels of HD programming for free, but reception is limited to metropolitan markets and programming is often limited to only a handful of channels.

The Microsoft Natural Keyboard 4000 is by far the nicest keyboard I have ever used [Tech Freaks Review] [PC Magazine Review]. I highly recommend this keyboard to anyone that spends a lot of time in front of a computer. Like many others, I noticed the dominant “Zoom” slider button on the front of the keyboard and have wondered why Microsoft did not make this slider customizable through the driver software. It turns out that with a slight modification, the zoom slider can turn into a scroll slider.