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Jason J.

Jason J.

Joined on 07/21/04

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 6
Most Favorable Review

Nice little device

TP-LINK TL-MR3020 3G/4G Wireless N150 Portable Router, Pocket Design, Multifunction, 150Mbps
TP-LINK TL-MR3020 3G/4G Wireless N150 Portable Router, Pocket Design, Multifunction, 150Mbps

Pros: Got this to load Piratebox firmware on for use in Afghanistan, turns out it's a surprisingly neat little router/AP as it is. Decent range in a heavily flooded WiFi area, using it as an AP to do voip calls on my cell phone 50-75 feet away. Plenty of features in the admin interface. It's small and easy to hide away or put in your pocket, and it's powered by a common mini-USB plug. So happy I'm keeping this as an AP and ordering another one for my original intent.

Cons: none

Most Critical Review

Not bad, not amazing

NETGEAR GS724T Smart ProSafe Gigabit Smart Switch
NETGEAR GS724T Smart ProSafe Gigabit Smart Switch

Pros: Decent switch with gig ports for reasonable price.

Cons: Weak management interface, and poor features. Ping or HTTP monitoring of the device kills the management interface within 5-10 mins. Even spacing the monitoring out to a few pings every few mins doesn't help. SNMP polling is useless after about 30 mins, switch stops responding to SNMP and the management interface.

Overall Review: Used this on a less critical part of a network to save buying pricey Cisco gear, well it's a decent device but I'm about to spend 4 times as much for Cisco gear anyway to replace it. You get what you pay for...$250 gets you a switch that kind of works, $1k gets you a switch that will run for years without a reboot or stupid management issues. Avoid the remarks from other comments saying Cisco is too complex or hard...well there's a reason why it's called enterprise equipment, do you think you're connecting to this website via budget Netgear switches? If you know IOS and need something reliable go Cisco. Netgear doesn't cut it for anything important.

Decent SSD

Mushkin Enhanced Chronos 2.5" 60GB SATA III Asynchronous MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) MKNSSDCR60GB
Mushkin Enhanced Chronos 2.5" 60GB SATA III Asynchronous MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) MKNSSDCR60GB

Pros: Good little SSD, out of the box on a new Lenovo laptop it was causing Windows 7 to freeze up under any moderate disk IO. Updated the firmware and so far it's only frozen the computer once which may not have had anything to do with the drive.

Cons: Still annoying that SSD's have been out for awhile now and they still have stupid controller issues requiring ongoing firmware updates to try and work out the bugs.

Overall Review: Worth it for a low end system that you need to speed up, but I'd go with a better brand and avoid the sanforce controller for any serious setups.

Nice laptop

Lenovo 15.6" AMD E-450 4GB Memory DDR3 1066 Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit 43834WU
Lenovo 15.6" AMD E-450 4GB Memory DDR3 1066 Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit 43834WU

Pros: Got this for my mother to replace an older Dell laptop. It's simple, and well built, doesn't feel cheap. has a nice bright screen, but nothing amazing with the lower res. If anything the lower res is good for older people to see things better with the screen size. I put a 60GB SSD in it and installed Win 7 without the extra Lenovo bloatware, and it's a pretty snappy system. It's not something I'd buy to do anything more than typical computing, as it stands now it's a great lower end system

Cons: none

Impressed

Coby 8" Portable LCD TV
Coby 8" Portable LCD TV

Pros: Picture isn't perfect but it's really really good for an 8" screen. Viewing angle of the screen is almost a full 180 degrees from side to side. Viewing angle of the screen is about 160 degrees from top to bottom. Feels reasonably solid, still plastic, but it feels like it will take a little abuse. Doesn't feel as cheap as I thought it would. Comes with both car adapter and wall adapter. Battery goes about 2.5 hours or so, seems to depend a little on brightness. Nice device overall.

Cons: Built-in antenna isn't great but is ok for portability, external antenna is a must if you want to pick up extra channels. External antenna is magnet mount, however the magnet is not strong enough to hold on a car when the antenna is fully extended at 75mph. Two sections of the six section antenna is about all you can get away with before it lets go. Tuner works ok...using the same external antenna in the same location, my full size TV picks up about 35% more channels. Carry case or sleeve should be included simply for screen protection, there are lower cost portable TV's that come with them. However no big deal, just get an 8"-10" netbook case/sleeve to protect it in a backpack.

Overall Review: I got this simply for the video input feature to receive video from wireless transmitter. I wasn't expecting anything amazing and honestly didn't need it to be amazing. I'm actually impressed with the picture quality, it's not a highend 40" LCD or anything, but it's really nice for the 8" size. A/C adapter gets rather hot when charging the TV while it's on. No big deal, but I would make sure the adapter has room to breath when it's plugged in. Took TV to office to show co-workers, one co-worker ordered one the same day. I also plan on buying another one for a relative in college.

Great little system

MSI Mega 865 PRO Intel Socket T(LGA775) Intel 865G 2 x 184Pin Intel Extreme Graphics 2 Media Center
MSI Mega 865 PRO Intel Socket T(LGA775) Intel 865G 2 x 184Pin Intel Extreme Graphics 2 Media Center

Comments: http://www.msi.com.tw/program/support/bios/bos/spt_bos_detail.php?UID=602&kind=4 This is a great little system, the engineering on the case design is nice. Very easy to build with no tools needed. The random reboots during the windows installs are from the EM64T CPUs, a simple BIOS update fixes this bug. http://www.msi.com.tw/program/support/bios/bos/spt_bos_detail.php?UID=602&kind=4 Overall great system, got it for a desktop box, and it ended up on my LCD TV for a media center PC.

10/13/2005