Pros: Very compact. Unassuming appearance. Quiet. Requires no dedicated power connection.

Cons: None so far!

Overall Review: The last external hard drive I bought was several years ago, one of those Fantom numbers that look like an old Mac Pro. It’s a 3.5" 1GB drive that has served me well over the years. But I’ve totally been doing that thing where you buy a big drive for backup purposes, and then, because it’s so much bigger than the drives you actually work from, you slowly end up just using it as regular storage. So I decided it’s time for a bigger backup. I sure am impressed with how much storage they can fit into a tiny little 2.5" drive these days! I do the Pogoplug + Arch Linux thing, and I was a little nervous about whether or not the Pogoplug would supply enough power through the USB port. It does! I simply plugged it in, formatted it Ext3, and was off to the races.

Pros: It's nice and thin and stylish, much like myself. And it's great to get OS updates quickly.

Cons: When I sent it in for service, they smashed the screen and insisted it had arrived that way even though they sent me photos of it at the repair facility with the screen un-smashed. I found other Asus customers online with exactly the same story. Since they sent it back, the screen shows quite a bit of banding, sometimes spazzes out and registers fake touches, and other times doesn't recognize any input at all. And what am I supposed to do, send it back to be repaired again?

Overall Review: Asus is dead to me. In the future, I will happily pay substantially more for an equivalent product from another manufacturer.

Pros: Seriously, it is just lovely. I wasn’t sure I was up a white phone, but there’s a Kubrickian quality to it that I just adore. The size is quite manageable (I abhor the way phones are all so absurdly large these days). The display makes everything appear gorgeous. The feel of the aluminum buttons just make you want to keep changing the volume forever. And it takes marvelous photos, usually with no discernable noise.

Cons: There’s a bit of a camera, er, bump (Newegg finds apparently finds the word people usually use to be inappropriate) that makes it feel a bit awkward to rest the phone on a tabletop. And occasionally those marvelous photos can look a little overprocessed if you examine them closely.

Overall Review: This is my second Lumia. The first was a cheap model that I bought almost three years ago so I could wait for something to come along that I actually wanted, probably an Android. But I fell in love with the interface immediately. It’s true that there are plenty of little things that you can do in Android that make it feel like a whole miniaturized computer. But for texting, making calls, taking photos, and looking things up quickly, I’d rather have a device that’s quick and focused.

Pros: Two devices on one tiny USB receiver

Cons: Poorly constructed, unreliable, very short warranty period

Overall Review: For some time, I was a happy owner of another version of this package, the RKM-1600RF. Then one day I drunkenly dropped the keyboard on the floor one last time. That set had lasted me a few years. I had appreciated it for its simplicity; both the keyboard and the mouse were comfortable but as compact as can be. They weren't *nice* by any means, but they performed much better than I had any business expecting for the price (the same price as this set here). I wanted to buy the same product again, but it looks like it's discontinued. I looked around at options that combined a mouse and a keyboard on a receive small enough for me to leave it plugged in when I carry my computer around, and the keyboard had to have a number pad. Options were scarce, so I went with this. The keyboard is still decent. It's a bit bulkier than the other one, with deeper keys, and it lacks media keys, which I don't feel strongly about one way or the other. The mouse is frustrating. Light escapes from under it while it sits on my desk, and the flickering red glow is a minor but persistent vexation. Relative to the other mouse, it just crosses the size threshold at which I would no longer consider carrying it around in a bag with me. And it sometimes stops responding for several minutes to an hour at a time. Finally, the very first time I pulled the receiver out of my USB port, it came apart, leaving the casing for the contacts stuck inside. This happened after the product's unusually brief warranty period. No matter how modest your requirements are, I don't think this is the mouse and keyboard for you.

Pros: Very straightforward. I turned off my computer, took out the old stick, snapped this one in, and turned the computer back on. Five minutes.

Cons: None at all.

Overall Review: I put this in my HP DM4, replacing a 2GB stick and thereby going from a total of 6GB to 8GB. I wasn’t sure I wanted to got through with it for a while, because I didn’t know how much of a difference those extra 2GB would make, and I was a little nervous about mixing and matching (I’m still using the 4GB stick my computer came with). I needn’t have worried. The new RAM has worked perfectly, and the performance of my machine has gone from decent to silky. Sometimes I just want to open and close Illustrator over and over to marvel at how quick it is.

Pros: Fast, spacious, and inexpensive.

Cons: None