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Michael K.

Michael K.

Joined on 06/06/08

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 3
Most Favorable Review

Excellent "business monitor"

SAMSUNG S27A850D Matt Black 27" 5ms WQHD LED Backlight Widescreen PLS Panel LCD Monitor 300 cd/m2 1000:1
SAMSUNG S27A850D Matt Black 27" 5ms WQHD LED Backlight Widescreen PLS Panel LCD Monitor 300 cd/m2 1000:1

Pros: Perfect non-glare coating. Text is very sharp.

Cons: Won't auto-wake from sleep: have to push power button on and off. Not perfect consistency based on viewing angle. Light bleed from corners.

Overall Review: The box says this is a "business monitor," and for normal every-day computing purposes such as reading and editing Word documents, viewing Excel spreadsheets, surfing the quality of this monitor is incredible and blows away the cheap piece of junk on my desk at work. If anything, my complaint is that the monitor is TOO BIG for mere web surfing. Even though it's a large monitor, it's very thin, much thinner than the Samsung 214T which its replacing. And you can adjust the monitor any-which-way as far as height or angle. The integrated USB 3.0 hub is actually very convenient if you're going to use the monitor to dock a notebook computer. And the displayport input works great with my MacBook Air. But remember, even though it's a pretty expensive monitor, it's only an entry-level 2560 x 1440 monitor, so if you have some critical need for editing photos or video, you should heed the warnings of others which I think are accurate. There's some light bleed in the bottom corners which is easily noticeable when the screen is displaying something black and the lighting is dim, and there is not perfect consistency in brightness and color temperature if you change your viewing angle (although I don't think this is any worse than on the "Retina" display on my new iPad). My main annoyance with the monitor is not about the stuff above, but that it won't auto-wake from sleep when used with my desktop computer with a Radeon 5700 series video card (if you computer is set to sleep the monitor after a certain amount of inactivity)--I need to toggle the on-off button on the front of the panel.

Most Critical Review

Once installed, works fine, but what a PITA to install

EVGA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti GAMING, 04G-P4-6251-KR, 4GB GDDR5, DX12 OSD Support (PXOC)
EVGA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti GAMING, 04G-P4-6251-KR, 4GB GDDR5, DX12 OSD Support (PXOC)

Pros: Turns an old computer with a PCIe x16 expansion slot into a computer that can play modern games at 60 FPS (although not necessarily at the highest settings and not at 4K resolution). Yay! Doesn't matter if you computer only has PCIe 2.0. Don't have any complaints besides the problems explained below.

Cons: 1. After putting the card into the computer, and booting up: black screen. Did this many times. Black screen. After going into the computer's BIOS, and changing absolutely no settings, the computer finally booted up with an image. 2. After installing the EVGA program that allows you to change the clock settings and fan speed, all Google websites had all of the fonts in bold when using the Chrome browser. What a waste of time it was figuring out what caused that (the setup program installed Roboto bold without any other Roboto fonts). Big thumbs down to the EVGA programmers who could easily fix this problem and save a lot of aggravation for EVGA customers, but they haven't bothered to fix it.

Overall Review: If there had been no installation hassles, I would have given this 5 stars, but I'm balancing out a 5-star video card with a 1-star installation experience.

Seems great

Linksys E1200 Wireless-N300 Router
Linksys E1200 Wireless-N300 Router

Pros: The setup was really easy, I've had flawless wireless connectivity from all my devices since I turned it on several days ago (unlike the one I replaced by some other brand), and it's inexpensive, so I have no reason not to give it five stars.

Cons: None.