Pros: We prototyped a muscular business workstation for a client using this case, the idea being that its tiny size would FINALLY persuade users to stop putting their computers on the floor and instead push this tiny thing to a far corner of the cubicle desk and leave it there. They have since bought seven more, and other customers are buying them up like hot cakes. There are smaller ITX cases out there, but they will force performance compromises, and none are as well made as this one, with all aluminum and steel construction. The only plastic components are the side panel clips, power button, and front ports. It includes rear brackets for both ATX and ITX power supplies and they can be installed so that the fan is oriented in either direction vertically. Be sure to use a modular PSU if you go ATX because you WON'T have room for extra cables. It is STRONGLY recommended that you use an ATX power supply with a 12-14cm fan and orient its intake toward the motherboard so it can draw heat from the CPU/RAM and out of the case, as this is all of the ventilation the case will have and there isn't much space for hot CPU's (socket 2011) to effectively cool, nor is there room for many aftermarket CPU coolers to assist with this. Although some have complained that it is too bright for HTPC use (why didn't they save money and use an HTPC case?), I like the power and disk activity LED's being integrated into the power button. It keeps the face clean and they are perfectly bright for most lighting conditions. With an optical drive installed, there are mounting options for two 2.5" drives or three 2.5" drives without an optical drive installed. One 3.5" drive can be installed instead of two of the 2.5" drives by removing their bracket to reveal mounting holes in the bottom. All storage drives are mounted via rubber grommets to quiet hard drive vibrations (as if you weren't going to use an SSD!). There's even an expansion slot for installing expansion cards like discrete video if you so desire, but mind your length! You've only got about 7" and excess PSU cable length will almost certainly become an issue. I suggest cutting the PSU cables down if you have the know-how and want discrete graphics. Did I mention it is not only really small, but flexible enough to fit LOTS of horsepower in? Potential buyers go nuts when you show them a PC that is only slightly larger than a tissue box, then push the power button and it gets to a Win7 desktop in only 10 seconds. Just name a price and the checkbooks open up!

Cons: Both side panels are snap-fit only with no place to add screws. It does come with extra clips in case they break, but we haven't seen this happen. The USB3.0 cable for the motherboard header is actually TOO long. It must be carefully gathered or coiled between the front of the case and the header BEFORE installing the PSU, or the cable bend will push the cable out of the header. A dab of low-temp hot glue can prevent that problem. People in the LAN party set will want discrete graphics. Everyone knows that ITX boards only have one PCIe slot, but why didn't Lian-Li consider double-height graphics cards? That second slot on the back would accommodate much better GPU's for the gaming crowd. It's not a con because it is expected, but be aware that there is very little space between the CPU and the PSU when using an ATX PSU. Not many aftermarket coolers will fit in there. One reviewer mentioned a Noctua that does. I suppose you could use water cooling if you mounted the radiator externally, but we have always sold them with OEM coolers and stock clock speeds and customers don't usually complain about a 10 second boot time, instant file access, and instant app loads. The lack of a reset button is disappointing, but not surprising considering the previously mentioned effort to keep the face clean. A reset button would have added clutter, and is easily replaced by a 4-second-salute on the power button. Not everyone will like having to use a laptop-style slim optical drive and the associated adapter, but this is the cost of the diminutive size. Lian-Li makes a similar case with a 5.25" half-height bay for standard optical drives. It is just taller. If you read my pros carefully, you will note that, with an optical drive installed, you won't be able to install a 2.5" SSD for your system and a 3.5" HDD for your data at the same time. 2.5" HDD's are widely available up to 2TB, so you decide if this is a con. 1TB SSD's are also becoming more common, rapidly deprecating this convention. Why does nearly every case manufacturer have to emblazon the front of the case with their company name? We could silkscreen our company logo there, but having both will look crowded. They could put the brand name elsewhere that is still visible and less tech-savvy owners won't think that they own a "Lian-Li Computer" It's not toolless. Who cares? If you don't know how to work a #2 philips you are a tool.

Overall Review: So how do we spec these so that we get to name our price and they still sell like crazy? The customers have some options, but they are all pretty similar: *-Asrock FM2A85X-ITX motherboard (or Gigabyte GA-F2A85XN-WIFI if they want WiFi) *-Choice of A8-5500 through A10-6800K APU *-4, 8, or 16 GB of DDR3-1600 (8-8-8-24) and 32GB will be available once 16GB modules are easier to find. *-DVD-RW, Blu-Ray, or BD-RW (typically Samsung) *- 120GB, 240GB, 500GB, 750GB, or 1TB Samsung 840 EVO SSD (this is the REAL secret sauce. Sandforce can kiss my grits) *-FSP 80+ Platinum 450W modular PSU *-If they want discrete graphics, there are several Radeon HD7750 cards out there that will fit and can be adequately powered by the FSP PSU. *-Logitech MK270 and S120 to round it out A unit with all of the above options maxed out will boot Win7 Pro from power button to desktop in less than 10 seconds, and the people who aren't used to seeing anything but the crud at eye level in Bast Buy or Sem's will gleefully write $2500 checks and go on a waiting list to own such a tiny marvel of a power plant. It's a shame the case is at EOL and we will have to find something else to build them with eventually. BTW - Not one in that original customer's office has found its way to the floor yet.

Pros: LOTS of ports in a small space for the front of your PC, without the unnecessary ones (why do so many of these types of gadgets include audio ports, anyway? When was the last time you saw a case without audio ports?) This is the PERFECT device for a professional or hobbyist who frequently needs to connect varying types of external media to their computer. It's a one-stop-shop for connecting external hard drives, no matter what interface they use; USB, 4-pin or 6-pin firewire, or eSATA, and having the eSATA powered simplifies things greatly.

Cons: Although having a USB 3.0 hub instead of a single pass-through port is clever and useful for multiple devices (think copying large files from one external USB 3.0 hard drive to another), it's actually not a very good hub. The hub frequently refuses to acknowledge a device plugged into it without any type of feedback from the OS. In most cases, only a reboot will remedy the mystery. A Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 was utterly unable to boot to USB through the hub as well, which is rarely a problem with other hubs. Truthfully, only two USB 3.0 ports connected directly to an internal header would have made more sense than a hub requiring a pass-through cable to a type-A port. It would function more reliably and made good use of the header, whereas using a header the way it is engineered now would waste 50% of a header's capacity (hence the use of a pass-through cable instead of a header). Using a pass-through cable to the back of the computer is also really hokey. Benefit of the doubt/full disclosure: Maybe reliability and booting was only a problem because we used two of them in this customer's machine. I don't see why, but anything is possible. It makes one heck of a darn squid inside of the case, especially if you install two of them, but all of the cables are there for a reason: USB3, 1394, SATA, and power need to be connected. What's the USB2 header for, though?

Overall Review: What's with all of the complaining by other users about the 1394 pinout? The header is split up, yes, but every motherboard I have ever encountered with a 1394 header included a pinout diagram in the manual, and the manual was downloadable from the board maker's web site if it wasn't in easy reach. Heck, every 1394 pinout I have ever seen was identical. Google it or look it up in ANY motherboard manual that has firewire on board.

Pros: Western Digital has long used color designations to differentiate their consumer/SOHO hard drives. Black for high-end desktop drives, Red for NAS drives, Purple for surveillance, Blue for mainstream, Green for dime-store junk (enterprise drives have their own cryptic letter designation system). To keep things confusing, they have remained semi-loyal to this color-naming scheme with their SSD lineup. Ostensibly, the 2.5" SATA SSD's are Blue and the M.2 drives are Black, but then the M.2 drives are further divided into Blue and Black per SATA or PCIe interfaces, respectively. There is no Black 2.5" SATA SSD (yet) but the Blue ones are available in TLC and 3D VNAND models. Why the newer and faster 3D VNAND model didn't get a Black designation mystifies me, but it wasn't my call. WD just seems to like their SSD lineup to be as clear as mud. This review is for the latter, newer, 3D VNAND model of the 2.5" SATA Blue lineup. Available in several sizes, they sent me a 500GB model for testing. The data rates marketed on the outside of the box are tempting to a buyer, as they compete with even the later generations of Samsung's industry-leading EVO series. It has a fairly typical plastic case and bolts into a 2.5" bay or 3.5" adapter as easily as any drive. Seat-of-the-pants impressions during a fresh Windows 10 Pro install from USB3 and initial installation tasks (installing drivers, 7-zip, Chrome, etc) are that it was quite snappy and responsive. File transfers to and from an SSD RAID array in one of my servers over a 2Gb connection were as expected: Phenomenal speeds on large files, with a substantial hit to the speed for large quantities of small files. This is typical of any drive, HDD or SSD.

Cons: Even with an absolutely optimal environment, I was not able to achieve the advertised speeds with any type of transfer. It came close, but didn't hit the promised mark. Then again, those speeds were close enough to Samsung's latest offering that a casual observer would not notice the difference. What really bothers me is the surprisingly short warranty. 3 years is better than the 1 year we get with a lot of equipment, but 5 years seems to be the norm for SSD's these days. Considering the turnover rate in storage technology these days, in 3 years the speed and size will probably be antiquated anyway.

Overall Review: Options like this sure beat the old days of using a tiny SSD for the OS and having to run a large HDD if you wanted reasonable capacity, and the performance is as good or better than many offerings that have fatter price tags. This drive is going to slide nicely into a Lenovo laptop that a customer traded me against a labor balance that they owed, and my daughter won't be begging my wife and I to borrow our laptops or desktops anymore. It should serve her for at least a few years. For the budget conscious buyer, this is an excellent drive at an excellent value.

Pros: Although Linksys is approaching it's 30th anniversary in business, they didn't make on to most people's radar until the ubiquitous WRT54G hit the market in 2002 (of which I have owned and hacked many). Then they were acquired by Cisco in 2003, subsequently practically run into the ground for 10 years, and finally sold off to Belkin in 2013. I expected this to be another downturn, but Belkin has done a good job of bringing the company back to it's core business and appeal that made it successful in the days of yore. This is reinforced by the classic shape and color scheme of the WRT1900ACS. The beauty is far more than skin deep, though. As a career IT professional of more than 20 years, Linksys has earned a reputation with me since the Cisco acquisition as a mediocre to good brand with disproportionately astronomical prices. Although the WRT1900ACS is at the high end of their product line, it is no more expensive than most top-shelf routers and is thoroughly packed with great features and robust performance. Setting the 2.4 and 5.2 GHz bands to the same SSID/encryption/key automatically enables band steering, a feature normally found only on enterprise-level standalone access points, and it works well. Wireless clients can then automatically switch between bands to the strongest one without the user having to manually jump between separate wireless networks or weigh the pros/cons and choose one. The range is excellent, with both bands covering every corner of my brick 2100 square foot suburban split-level house easily, along with the 9000 square foot yard when using a TP-Link Archer T8E wireless adapter in a puny HP Pavilion P2-1033W desktop. My Lenovo laptop even had coverage a good ways down the street. It made syncing up the media library in the tiny Plex server in my wife's Venza for back seat passengers painless. The external antennas are a good departure from other modern designs, and I credit them for the excellent range. They use standard antenna connections, so larger antennas can be installed for even greater range if it is needed. Unlike a lot of routers, the USB3 ports actually do perform at USB3 speeds. SMB connections to SSD's and HDD's connected to them were relatively indistinguishable from being locally connected. The presence of eSATA was also cool, but I didn't test it and the rapid deprecating of eSATA to USB3 makes it primarily ornamental and little other than a marketing bullet point to all but the rarest of users. Throughput on the internal switch is excellent and I have yet to saturate a port, no matter how demanding of a load I placed on them. The firmware was a little buggy out of the box, but a new one was available and updating to it quickly stabilized all issues. It includes everyone's favorites, like port triggering and forwarding, good firewall controls, mac whitelisting and blacklisting, WPS, QoS, and a Guest WiFi. Awesome notable additions are an OpenVPN server (which I love and use heavily), built-in Ookla speed test, and a surprisingly accurate network map. Best of all, Linksys is no longer making an active effort to lock users out of the firmware and are now actively advertising OpenWRT compatibility. Want to expand this router's usefulness WAY above and beyond factory? Pick your favorite WRT build and flash it in! Most of the good ones have already been ported to this model and it has CPU/memory to spare for them to include all features instead of you having to choose one with some features stripped out because it didn't fit into the EEPROM. Way to win back the hearts of the die-hard nerd set, Linksys! For number lovers, my 300Mb/s cable pipe speed tested at 322Mb/s from BEHIND this router (on a wired connection through an uplinked Procurve managed switch). Excellent. The aforementioned HP desktop pulled down just under 300Mb/s over Wi-Fi with both bands connected. Not bad!

Cons: There's little to complain about, but some things do warrant mentioning. It's as big as Texas and can't be stood on end. Plan a pretty big footprint on your shelf or desk for it. Why the heck is the WPS button on the back? That's pretty inconvenient. It reminds me of Cisco-era designs. Although feature-rich, the firmware is not the easiest to navigate. You can put your most commonly used sections on the main page, but you'll eventually spend more time than you should digging for that one setting. It's still better than most, but I wish it was better. The EA6500 I reviewed in March of 2013 had a better layout, and I'm pretty sure that was a Cisco-era design. By no means were any of my complaints big enough to remove an egg.

Overall Review: It's hard to convey the gravity of how well this router has performed from the day it came out of the box. The entire infrastructure of our IT consulting business is based out of our home office, so the demands we have placed on this router have not been small, and it has delivered. In fact, we are so impressed with this router that we have decommissioned our pfSense firewall in favor of it. Anyone familiar with pfSense will know what an endorsement that is of this router. If you've got the budget and want a reliable, fast router or need good features for small enterprise, GET THIS ONE.

Pros: I was shipped this unit some time back for testing, but a terrible car crash (danged drunk drivers!) nearly killed me shortly after the holidays and caused me to get backlogged on my Eggxpert reviews. It's a miracle I haven't been blackballed from the program. This hard drive is extremely similar to a 1TB model that I was sent a few years ago, with some pretty big improvements. The case feels much more sturdy and rugged, the included cable is longer, the capacity is (obviously) four times as large, and it is considerably faster. Because of my personal delays, I actually put it to more use than I usually do a test item before writing the review. This drive can perform all expected tasks of an external drive easily and with aplomb. I have used it to shuttle large amounts of data between my office and customer sites, used it with Backup Exec as well as Windows Server's integrated backup, imaged to and from it in Ghost32 from a DOS environment, all in various OS's including live ones like the WinPE builds on my Hiren's USB as well as a few Linux distros, and as I type this a backup of my domain controller is being written to it for use to run a bare metal restore to dissimilar hardware (we're upgrading, yay!). It never misses a beat no matter what I throw at it. I haven't checked with a thermometer, but as far as I can tell there is no significant heat produced by the case, so it is dispersing the heat of the drive very well, but then again it's only a 5400RPM. Being powered by the USB is a big plus, as I can just throw it in a briefcase and carry it around without having to fumble with a power cord. I can imagine some cheap hardware not having enough power capacity available on a USB port to reliably power it, but this hasn't happened to me yet in literally hundreds of computers I have connected it to. Even the USB3 port on a Linksys WRT1900ACS router had no problem with it (but that is a beefy router, YMMV with cheaper routers). It also runs essentially silent, even when spinning up or under heavy load.

Cons: It's my job to find fault with the hardware I'm sent, but this is one of those cases where it was very hard to do. Considering the severe enterprise-level demands I have placed on this drive without a single problem, how can I complain? The best I can offer is that the warranty is disappointing. Doesn't Seagate have more faith in their product than one year?

Overall Review: The price is good, the performance is excellent, and the capacity is as big as one can hope for these days without needing external power. I can't recommend this drive enough for practically any application that calls for easily removable external storage.

Pros: You know, if an item only has a few reviews and it's rating is low, the rating is automatically suspect. Any factory can barf out a few bad units when mass producing a product. Or just a few incompetent reviewers can skew the rating of a good product in the wrong direction. I have quite a bit of faith in the knowledge and talent of my fellow eggxperts, so surely the poor ratings were due to a few bad units, right? After all, this watch has handy features like a pedometer, altimeter, sleep tracker, fitness meter, and other goodies. It can even initiate calls on your phone, display and compose messages on the phone, and show you the phone's address book. It all works once you get it working, so it sounds great, right? Read on.

Cons: I think this thing came in a cereal box as the prize at the bottom. The construction was as flimsy and chitzy as any piece of electronics I have ever handled, toy or business-grade. The touchscreen was terribly prone to scratches and not particularly sensitive or accurate, so you often find yourself in the wrong app and trying to find your back to where you were. The text is generally painfully small to read on the screen and the resolution is low enough that enlarging it with a magnifying glass turns it into a blob of pixels. The app for connecting it to your phone is hard to find and tricky to configure (the QR codes included on the HORRIBLE instructions don't point to anywhere useful to someone who doesn't speak Chinese). It just plain looks and feels like a toy on your wrist. Oh, and did I mention that my first review sample was DOA and had to be replaced? That makes 2 eggxperts to have the exact same experience! Except that my second sample never died, although it might as well.

Overall Review: I really wanted to be the one who had some good things to say about this watch and raise the review average. Alas, I agree with the others. The only reason I gave it a second egg is because it does actually work if you have the patience to get it working, but I suggest waiting for smartwatch technology to mature a little bit and spending more than $20-$30 on it.