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Greg S.

Greg S.

Joined on 02/19/02

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 16
Most Favorable Review

Best use of a single 5.25" bay EVER!

Scythe SCKMRK-5 Kama Rack 5 Mobile Rack for two 2.5" SATA HDD/SSD w/ Card Reader & USB/e-SATA Port
Scythe SCKMRK-5 Kama Rack 5 Mobile Rack for two 2.5" SATA HDD/SSD w/ Card Reader & USB/e-SATA Port

Pros: Works flawlessly. Tried every card slot, even the microsd. 4 drive letters show up in explorer, and my motherboard's bios also sees 4 drives it could boot from or load a firmware update from too. Both 2.5" bays are great. They have spring loaded doors in the drive slots and are a little taller than the normal drive. There's a couple of springy plastic fingers inside the 2.5" bay that guide the drive into it's connector. You can feel the drive sort of pop into place when it's fully inserted. There's a red activity LED for both of the 2.5" drive docks. Comes with all cables needed, 3x SATA and an internal USB cable. It may be a little more pricey than a typical card reader, but it's worth every penny to me!

Cons: The only real con is that the mounting screw holes are simply holes through the plastic case. I could see someone stripping them out if they try to use too much force while screwing it in. Maybe they should have used some kind of metal threading for the holes. Just be kind to it and you should be fine. Some may consider it a con I guess, but there's a green power LED that's always on when there's power to the unit. It also needs 3x SATA cables, a USB cable, and a SATA power cable to be hooked up to it. So it's kind of a cable squid, but that's really to be expected. Overall, nothing to deduct an egg over.

Overall Review: Everyone should use a 2.5" hdd dock and drives to do their backups on. MUCH faster transfer than external usb drives. Drive into the dock, do the business, and back into the fire safe it goes. They even make nice storage cases for 2.5" drives now too.

Most Critical Review

USB cable way too short

2M 6.6Ft Long MHL Micro USB HDMI Cable Adapter Connector to HDTV for Samsung Galaxy S3 SIII i9300 Samsung Galaxy Note 2 N7100
2M 6.6Ft Long MHL Micro USB HDMI Cable Adapter Connector to HDTV for Samsung Galaxy S3 SIII i9300 Samsung Galaxy Note 2 N7100

Pros: Cable does work as advertised on my Verizon Galaxy S3. It's a very cheap working solution. Shipping was fast and arrived fine.

Cons: USB cable is way too short. Around 2ft. Almost to the point of the cable being worthless. Unless you've got a USB port on your TV or the monitor you're plugging it into, it's not going to reach without an extension cable. There's 2 cables coming out of the HDMI connector, USB and MHL. This would at least be a little better if the cables were joined at the USB connector instead of the HDMI connector.

Overall Review: This isn't the cable's fault, but unfortunately I don't get a notification or a resolution applet that pops up when it's connected on my S3 like I do my tablet. It also runs both the HDMI display and the phone's LCD at the same time. This dramatically reduces the CPU power available to decode HD movies and the video is sluggish. Forget about playing games at all. There's 2 things working against the cpu/gpu here, driving both displays at once and not being able to reduce the resolution from 1080/60. My tablet fixes both problems by letting you select the resolution and turning off the phone's LCD. Again, not the cable's fault, but something you should be aware of.

Great buy at $139!

ASUS Nexus 7 1GB Memory 7.0" 1280 x 800 Tablet PC Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) Black
ASUS Nexus 7 1GB Memory 7.0" 1280 x 800 Tablet PC Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) Black

Pros: Battery life, speed of the device, 4.3 update.. Bought 2 of these for my 7 year old twins. Plugged them in, ran through the first start wizard, punched in their gmail addresses, connected to my wifi, ran the 4.3 update, everything went smooth as silk on both. Battery life is outstanding. Much longer than I expected. They use the internet, install stuff from the Play Store, play lots of gpu intensive games, watch videos. Battery lasts all day. I gave one of the old Mali400 based tablets my boys had to the wife and she's highly jealous of my boys new tablets. Looks like I'm dropping another $140 on a Nexus for her too :-/

Cons: First off, I want to say that I knew all of the items below before purchase, and I'm ok with this stuff. Which is why I didn't deduct any eggs. I'm including it here just so others know. This is a refurbed unit. Which means that it essentially comes with the tablet, the usbac power adapter, and a usb cable in a plain brown box. There's no SD card slot on the Nexus 7. There's no rear facing camera. There is one on the screen side though.

Overall Review: Unlike others reports, both of the tablets I bought updated perfectly fine to 4.3. I made sure both were connected to the power adapter and charging, both were connected to a *stable* internet connection, and once the update started I just let them do their thing. No issues whatsoever. It was literally the first thing I did after entering in the gmail address during initial setup.

12/30/2013

Great travel cart!

CONAIR TS34F Travel Smart Flat Folding Multi-Use Cart
CONAIR TS34F Travel Smart Flat Folding Multi-Use Cart

Pros: Folds up virtually flat to a size of less than 3ft long. Wheels automatically fold out when you open it up. Good construction. Seems like it will hold up well long term even with it's moving parts. This would make a great travel cart for luggage on a hard surface.

Cons: Wish the wheel base was a little wider for my needs, but not the cart's fault. I just didn't know precisely what I needed.

Overall Review: I actually use this as a cart to hold my fishing gear and cooler when I go fishing. I've logged 4 miles on this cart over uneven compacted dirt and gravel trails and over weeds with probably around 40 pounds strapped to it. Still rolls as smooth and folds/opens as well as the day I got it. With that being said, it does have a little tendency to tip left or right sometimes when being rattled around on uneven ground. I don't think the designers had fishing trips in mind when they made it.

Just works.

TP-Link 8 Port Gigabit Ethernet Network Switch | Plug and Play | Desktop or Wall-Mount | Plastic Case Ethernet Splitter | Fanless | Traffic Optimization | Unmanaged (TL-SG1008D)
TP-Link 8 Port Gigabit Ethernet Network Switch | Plug and Play | Desktop or Wall-Mount | Plastic Case Ethernet Splitter | Fanless | Traffic Optimization | Unmanaged (TL-SG1008D)

Pros: Simply works as advertised. Plug it in, off it goes. No muss, no fuss. This is the second one of these I've bought. The first one is still running fine after about 6mo of 24/7 use. I really hammer that one with LAN > LAN transfers to my hardware raid setup. Never a hiccup.

Cons: It doesn't have a food replicator built in to serve me chocolate covered bacon?

Proper Dpad placement!

Logitech F310 Wired Gamepad Controller Console Like Layout 4 Switch D-Pad PC - Blue
Logitech F310 Wired Gamepad Controller Console Like Layout 4 Switch D-Pad PC - Blue

Pros: HOORAY! Finally someone made a PC compatible Xbox controller with the Dpad in the proper spot and the 2 analog sticks next to each other! Pad in Xbox/Xinput mode works wonderful in Windows Live Games. Played Mortal Kombat (among others) like a pro from Steam. You can flip the mode switch without having the unplug/replug the pad. Nice.

Cons: Requires a separate software download and install than the normal Logitech Gaming Software used with the G500 series of mice and keyboards. Really wished I could just use 1 app for keyboard/mouse/gamepad. Would make things much much simpler. I have to ding it an egg for that. This might be a matter of preference, but the left/right lower trigger buttons have a pretty long throw on them. The ones above on the shoulders are normal buttons though. I'd prefer the triggers to have half the throw, if that.