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Nicholas H.

Nicholas H.

Joined on 04/14/08

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 4
Most Favorable Review

Good looking and well built

hec Black 0.7mm Thickness SECC (Japanese Steel Metal) 8K 8K01BBA12 Mini-ITX Desktop
hec Black 0.7mm Thickness SECC (Japanese Steel Metal) 8K 8K01BBA12 Mini-ITX Desktop

Pros: Well finished and quite nice looking (it's a computer case after all). Parts fitted together well, installation of my Zotac Ion mini-itx board was a breeze. Quiet PSU fan, good power connectivity.

Cons: Fitting a 3.5" HDD once all the motherboard connectors are in place needs a gentle touch but very do-able.

Overall Review: I bought this as a HTPC and it runs very quietly which was my main concern going in. The Mo-Bo is fanless,which helps, but the case fan is very nice and quiet.

Perfect for Pi

Kingston 4GB microSDHC Flash Card W/ E-Tail clamshell Model SDC4/4GBET
Kingston 4GB microSDHC Flash Card W/ E-Tail clamshell Model SDC4/4GBET

Pros: Work as sold. Good price.

Cons: None

Overall Review: I bought 3 of these to test various deployments of OSs to my Raspberry Pi and as storage and so far they have all worked as intended.

Great laptop for the money

TOSHIBA Laptop Portege Intel Core i5-2410M 4GB Memory 640GB HDD Intel HD Graphics 3000 13.3" Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit R835-P56X
TOSHIBA Laptop Portege Intel Core i5-2410M 4GB Memory 640GB HDD Intel HD Graphics 3000 13.3" Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit R835-P56X

Pros: - The i5 is a great chip and this laptop seems to make great use of it. - Having an inbuilt optical drive (DVD write) is fantastic at this weight/price. - Screen size and resolution are perfect for what I need, which is a portable machine that I can use for a little development and general browsing/reading. - The keyboard took a little getting used to, but I've grown to really like it, positive but not overly 'clicky'. - I like being able to disable the touchpad when using a usb mouse, stops random mouse movements when resting your palms!

Cons: - The camera sucks, but for low quality video calls on Skype it's really just fine. - The pre-installed OS/utilities are a pain, but as others have said, I just grabbed a clean install of Win7 and installed that using the key on the base of the unit. - The screen can be a little reflective in high brightness environments as it's a bit glossy, but nothing that makes it unusable and I'm rarely in situations like that. - I find the track pad a little insensitive when trying to use the scroll (stroking the right hand edge of the pad), find that sometimes it works and other times it just moves the mouse. That might be my inaccuracy but it can be annoying as my old laptop did that really nicely (about all it did nicely mind).

Overall Review: Pro or con, depends on your view, but there is no catch when you close the lid. This worried me at first, but has not proven to be a problem. The battery life isn't quite what they state but it's not bad either, I get 4-5 hours with it on WiFi and charging other devices plugged in on the USB, so still very reasonable. Has a good set of ports, all that I need from a laptop. It runs quietly most of the time, unless I put it under real load and its build quality is very good. Overall, I'm very happy with it and would have expected to pay a good few hundred bucks more for what I got.

Does the job

Cooler Master Elite 310 RC-310-BKR2-GP Black with blue front panel Steel Body / ABS plastic front bezel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 420W Power Supply
Cooler Master Elite 310 RC-310-BKR2-GP Black with blue front panel Steel Body / ABS plastic front bezel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 420W Power Supply

Pros: Bought the box as part of a Newegg package, using it for an OpenFiler installation. Have four internal 1TB drives which the case holds easily. Considering it comes with power supply, I can't complain at the price. Power supply is also quiet. Along with my four Hitachi drives you're hard pushed to know the machine is on.

Cons: None so far.

11/24/2010