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Daniel A.

Daniel A.

Joined on 09/14/04

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 11
Most Favorable Review
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium HD 24-bit 192KHz PCI Express x1 Interface Sound Card powered by THX TruStudio Pro
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium HD 24-bit 192KHz PCI Express x1 Interface Sound Card powered by THX TruStudio Pro

Pros: Excellent sound quality and drivers that work correctly in Windows 7 x64.

Cons: None, except for the price.

Overall Review: I purchased this card to act primarily as a high-quality music playback card and secondarily as a gaming card. As an audiophile, sound quality is obviously very important; this card delivers. Creative not only got their drivers right this time around, they also used some excellent quality audio components, including Burr-Brown digital-to-analog converters normally found in higher-grade audio components. All things considered, I'm very happy with this purchase, especially since newegg had it on sale.

Works well (Download E-File Product code is working now!)

H&R BLOCK Tax Software Premium 2018 Windows - Download
H&R BLOCK Tax Software Premium 2018 Windows - Download

Pros: Very straightforward to use. It guides you very clearly through all parts of filling and filing your tax return.

Cons: Nothing significant. The only downside is that some ancillary forms (that I didn't need) were still a work in progress, as the IRS is still finalizing some of them.

Overall Review: Some people reported that product code supplied with some earlier download versions was not working for the free federal E-File. However, when I tried E-filing my federal return, it worked successfully using the product code that newegg supplied with the digital download, so it looks like any problems related to that are fixed now!

AMD Athlon II X3 450 - Athlon II X3 Rana Triple-Core 3.2 GHz Socket AM3 95W Desktop Processor - ADX450WFGMBOX
AMD Athlon II X3 450 - Athlon II X3 Rana Triple-Core 3.2 GHz Socket AM3 95W Desktop Processor - ADX450WFGMBOX

Pros: Cheap and reasonably fast. Some of them are unlockable to 4 cores with almost no effort.

Cons: Not the fastest CPUs out there. Not all of them can be unlocked.

Overall Review: I bought two of these for new computers for my family. One of them unlocked to 4 cores, one of them didn't. Paired with a GIGABYTE GA-880GM-D2H, a WD caviar black, and an Antec earthwatts, they draw about ~45W at idle. Not bad at all, especially given the price.

ASUS 18.5" TFT LCD LCD Monitor 5 ms 1366 x 768 D-Sub VH192D
ASUS 18.5" TFT LCD LCD Monitor 5 ms 1366 x 768 D-Sub VH192D

Pros: Cheap. Works great. No dead pixels.

Cons: No DVI/HDMI port; Analog VGA only.

Intel X25-V 2.5" 40GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) SSDSA2MP040G2K5
Intel X25-V 2.5" 40GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) SSDSA2MP040G2K5

Pros: - Reliable - Good write speed

Cons: - Small capacity - Slower write speed

Overall Review: Bought this for an Intel Atom mini computer for my father's office, running Windows 7 x64. If you use this as a boot drive, make sure to minimize the amount of writes to the drive in order to improve performance and preserve the durability of the flash. If you have a lot of RAM, you can disable the page file. You can also disable hibernation, windows search indexing, and even move other write-heavy operations to an alternate drive.

Cheap but good

GIGABYTE GA-73VM-S2 LGA 775 NVIDIA GeForce 7050/nForce 610i Micro ATX Intel Motherboard
GIGABYTE GA-73VM-S2 LGA 775 NVIDIA GeForce 7050/nForce 610i Micro ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: Inexpensive and stable motherboard

Cons: Single channel memory, not very many extra features

Overall Review: It was for a simple computer build with 2x512MB of DDR2, a Celeron E1200, and a SATA hard drive and DVD±RW. I had zero problems with it and it worked fine using mostly stock settings. I didn't get a chance to try any of the additional features though as the computer doesn't need to be overclocked, etc...