Blast from the past: originally published June 17th 2003.

I’ve finally started playing some games on my X-Box. A guy at work was selling his X-Box with two controllers and some games for a song, so I couldn’t pass up the deal. Got it home and read the manual. Grabbed an HDTV adapter the next day and set it to take advantage of the various resolutions available, plus hooked an optical cable for Dolby Digital sound. My X-Box was ready for whatever I threw at it, which was nothing …

Blast from the past: originally published September 27th 2002.

The concept is so simple it makes you wonder why it wasn’t thought of before. Take flash memory and put it into a compact size, small enough to fit on a keychain. The entire unit is comprised of the cover and the DiskonKey memory module; a hard oblong plastic unit with a USB connector on one end. The picture says it all; simple, effective, easy.
Operation takes simplicity to another level. For Windows ME users forward to XP, plug the device into a …

Blast from the past: originally posted February 14th 2002.

Way back in 1991 I bought my first PC; a shiny Magnavox 386SX 20MHz. After a few months I began upgrading pieces of it, leading me to realize I needed a new system. I wanted to build it myself, so I did a ridiculous amount of research and decided on an AMD 386DX 40 MHz with 8 MB of RAM. My real concern was getting a good sized case to put everything in; I already had a 1x Sony …

Blast from the past: originally published December 6th 2002.

When you look back at the life of the computer, a few standouts have gone the distance. The floppy drive began as the only affordable way people could run programs and trade files, and has carried on in various shapes and sizes. Today all of us have a 3.5” floppy drive in our PCs, ready for those hard little diskettes. Who could imagine a computer without the off white mouse, two or three buttons and a rolling wheel underneath …

Blast from the past: originally published August 7th 2001, updated July 12th 2002.

It’s interesting what gets lost in the hectic pace of the computer industry. I have a lot of hardware floating around my office, and when I eventually get around to using something it’s a struggle to find drivers and technical information.
I built a system for one uncle a few years ago; standard fair Intel machine with an 810e motherboard and a Sound Blaster AWE64D PCI sound card. Everything OEM and in static bags; …

I’m the process of setting up a home theater PC (HTPC) on each of my two home televisions.  I have Logitech Harmony universal remotes on both but need a keyboard and mouse for my living room HTPC.  While perusing Staples before the holidays I came across the HP Wireless Mini Keyboard: a compact 2.4GHz wireless keyboard with a built-in mouse.

The packaging bills this device as a replacement for a laptop keyboard but it works wonderfully on a HTPC.  The keyboard is a netbook chiclet style and there is a small …

Blast from the past: originally published October 6th 2000.
It’s a sad time when I can’t get in any game playing, but that’s what happened this week.  I’ve beaten most of my games in single player mode and look for the challenge of multiplayer mayhem, but none of my friends were available.  I know I could just log in and fight a stranger, but what’s the point of that? I want to team up with a friend and then crush strangers into dust.  Otherwise why play games …

Blast from the past: originally published July 20th 2004.

The lure of a large monitor is strong for those of us who sit in front of a PC all day long. Simply for the fact that we don’t sit in front of the PC, but the monitor. TFT ( thin film transistor ) panels are all the rage, but value and quality come into play with a large CRT ( cathode ray tube ) monitor.

For several years I had used a Sony Multiscan 500PS 21” monitor, but is …

Blast from the past: originally posted December 14th 2000.
I was putting together a system for a friend and he needed a reliable mid tower case from a reputable manufacturer at a good price.  Isn’t that what we’re all looking for when building a computer?  I looked around at what was available and decided on the Aopen HX45A mid ATX tower case.  Let’s take a look at this rugged unit.
The HX45A is Aopen’s current mid tower offering.  I had purchased a few about three years …

With Apple’s release of iOS 4 for their cornucopia of portable devices I was anxious to get this update for my .  Before I could install the new OS I had to install a new version of iTunes, 91.1.1.12, which I did successfully through the prompts in iTunes.  Everything was very smooth.

On reboot I again connected my iPhone and was prompted to install the new OS.  It first started a backup of my phone and I waited for it to advance.  And waited some more: I gave it an hour …

I’m a PC enthusiast and as such long for the latest and greatest hardware.  Every time a new CPU, chipset or video card gets released and receives rave reviews I instantly go to my chosen online retailers and price things out.  Then reason sets in and I put away my credit card.  The reasoning is simple and effective: my current PC does everything I need.
Perhaps need is a bit strong.  My home PC is used for gaming, email checking and web browsing, occasional photo editing and CD ripping.  I’m currently …

The BC4000 RAID HBA family, comprised of 64-bit, PCI-X low-profile compliant controller cards, are the only 2U compatible SATA RAID controller cards available today. The product family provides both four-drive (BCM4452-H) or eight-drive (BCM4852-H) support and are based on Broadcom’s new BCM5770 Serial ATA controller chip. The new Broadcom BCM5770 SATA chip and the BC4000 controller card significantly boost reliability with efficient power consumption and thermal load balancing, and feature a MTBF (mean time between failures) of 3.5 million hours, which is nearly three times greater than that of competitive …

I’m a big fan of Antec cases, having two series in use. I’ve been eyeing the new Performance Plus and Performance II series but found the price to be a little steep for my tastes. Recently I was perusing their site and found the Solution series, a low cost alternative. A quick Google search revealed no reviews, so I ordered the largest of the series, the SLK3700AMB. After a few weeks went by it arrived. Within minutes of opening the box I was thoroughly impressed.
I’ll do my usual case review of moving from the …

This piece should be prefaced with the comment that this is a commentary on user experience with the Asus A7M266-D motherboard, not a full blown review.
I’ve always been a fan of dual CPU designs: the prospect of all that extra power just captivated me. Being a fan of AMD as well the Athlon MP line was too good to pass up. The draw of dual AMD CPUs and 64 bit 66 MHz PCI was strong: the focus of the site was moving to ATA RAID controllers and those PCI slots were needed …

FastTrak S150 SX4

Four-port Serial ATA RAID controller with 1.5Gbps per channel
32-Bit/66MHz PCI 2.2 interface
Support for RAID level 0, 1, 10, 5 and JBOD
Online array expansion and RAID level migration to add capacity on the fly
Supports hot swap of failed drives
Automatic/manual rebuild of hot spare drive
PerfectRAID technology for robust error handling and recovery of fatal, media and disk errors
Variable stripe block size support enables optimization for diverse application requirements
Supports up to 256MB of SDRAM memory
Seamless upgrade to Promise’s external storage solutions

Promise controllers and I are old friends, all the way back …

I’ve been a big Promise fan since the original FastTrak (later renamed FastTrak33 to fit with the product line). At the time I had a bunch of 2 GB Western Digital hard drives that I didn’t know what to do with. The idea of using a RAID controller to make one big 8 GB ( wow, that’s big ) drive was fantastic. Of course there were some growing pains, but the card worked great. What’s even better is that I just requested a new BIOS chip for the card and …

I picked this board up as I had a socket 939 Athlon x2 3800+ processor and needed to use it somewhere.  I checked around for a “cheap and cheerful” motherboard; something around $50, which usually means a Via chipset and limited features.  Picked up the Asus A8V-E SE and was delighted with the feature set of the Via K8T890 chipset; my only complaint was two SATA connectors instead of the standard four.

Installation was straight forward, as everything is well positioned on the board and the manual gave all the pertinent details.  …

Being a fan of computer cases, especially Antec cases, last year when I was building a new system I came across an excellent price on an Antec Atlas 550. For reference I suggest reading my original review: for this piece I’ll cover the differences between the two. This was a new model, the second in the Antec server line, a reworking of the Antec Titan that I had enjoyed so much. At the time the Atlas had the same 550 watt power supply (the Titan now comes with a 650 …

This one will be short and sweet with three options available for RAM: ECC (or parity), buffered (or registered), unbuffered.  First step is to match the RAM to your motherboard, so use SDRAM, DDR, DDR2 or FB-DIMM.  You don’t get a choice on that one.  As well you should match the speed of your memory to the motherboard and processor requirements.  It’s the additional choices listed above that matters to a server: let’s look at each.
ECC or error correcting code RAM contains extra chip(s) that check for any memory errors …

I bought an eVGA Nforce4 SLI motherboard a few years ago: nice board, socket 939 and was my main system until I upgraded to Core 2 Duo. Sold my old Athlon 64 x2 4400+ but had the motherboard lying around, along with the 2x 1 GB Pc3200 DIMMs. No real use until I picked up a cheap socket 939 Athlon 64 x2 3800+ and decided to build a secondary gaming system.
Once I had the system up and running I remembered the horrible fan noise from the chipset fan. …