cover
Alexander G.

Alexander G.

Joined on 02/22/04

0
0

Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 12
Most Favorable Review

Works fine

Rosewill RNX-A5-EX 2.4 GHz Indoor Omni-Directional (5 dBi x3) High Gain Antenna / Design For Wireless N 2x3 or 3x3 Solution/ SMA Connector
Rosewill RNX-A5-EX 2.4 GHz Indoor Omni-Directional (5 dBi x3) High Gain Antenna / Design For Wireless N 2x3 or 3x3 Solution/ SMA Connector

Pros: Magnet makes it easy to stick somewhere. Top connection speeds (270 Mbps) with my Encore ENWI-N adapter in 802.11n mode.

Cons: none that I have found.

Overall Review: Someone commented earlier that this antenna needs a ground plane. Wrong. Antennas of this type contain vertically oriented dipoles that do not require ground planes. You may have to rotate the antenna to get the best signal. The antennas should be vertically oriented on both your router and the antenna. The antenna works "line of sight", which means that it will not work if there is (for example) a large metal refrigerator in the way or it is stuck on the back of your computer box where it cannot "see" the router. Should go through a few normal walls okay though.

12/30/2009
Most Critical Review

Okay

BIOSTAR A770 A2+ AM2+/AM2 AMD 770 ATX AMD Motherboard
BIOSTAR A770 A2+ AM2+/AM2 AMD 770 ATX AMD Motherboard

Pros: Easy to set up and get going. Board is about an inch shorter than the BIOSTAR TF series, so it does not interfere with peripherals in the chassis. Also most connectors are located mid-board rather than on the back of the board.

Cons: Very disappointing - The SYSFAN drives the chassis fan at full speed, with no automatic speed adjustment option in the BIOS, so it makes for a VERY NOISY computer. I hope BIOSTAR makes an update in the BIOS for this soon. This is a BIG CON for me, since I can't stand noisy computers - drives me nuts. If anyone figures out how to fix adjust this, please post it. This system runs so cool, I'm considering just disconnecting the SYSFAN, but need to experiment with that later.

Overall Review: ASUS TA-891 chassis. AMD Athlon 64 x2 5200+ Brisbane, 2GB GSkill memory (dual channel), MSI RX1550 graphics card. Windows XP Pro SP2. If I had it to do again, I'd go with the BIOSTAR TF520-A2+, which is a better all around motherboard (though a bit longer and harder to fit into this chassis). The TF520-A2+ also has lots of better overclocking options also. Going from a single core to dual core processor with the same hard drive, you need to do a repair re-install of Windows, otherwise the system will reboot continuously. Just mentioning this in case someone has that problem - like I did.

no support

Transcend 2.5" 64GB PATA MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) TS64GPSD330
Transcend 2.5" 64GB PATA MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) TS64GPSD330

Pros: huh? I wish I could try it out to find out if there are any.

Cons: No hard drive cloning software included with the disk. Transcend's website supposedly has it, but when I try to download it, I get an error message in Chinese which I had to translate into English on another website, only to find out that the download site doesn't exist.

Sam sang, then keeled over

SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1 HD322HJ 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive Bare Drive
SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1 HD322HJ 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: Quiet

Cons: Intermittent booting after 1 year + 4 months. Decided to replace it.

Overall Review: Back to Western Digital..

Okay while it's working

ENCORE ENUWI-N 802.11n Wireless Adapter IEEE 802.11b/g, IEEE 802.11n Draft 2.0 USB 2.0 Up to 300Mbps Wireless Data Rates
ENCORE ENUWI-N 802.11n Wireless Adapter IEEE 802.11b/g, IEEE 802.11n Draft 2.0 USB 2.0 Up to 300Mbps Wireless Data Rates

Pros: Works very well, good strong signal, high data rate.

Cons: I have owned two of these. They both died after about a year.

Overall Review: Download drivers from Ralink.

Many Bad Sectors on 1 of 2 disks

Western Digital Caviar RE WD1600YS 160GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive Bare Drive
Western Digital Caviar RE WD1600YS 160GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: Price was okay.

Cons: I bought two of these disks. One of the two had so many bad sectors that the Western Digital scan software could not repair it and terminated the scan. However, I was eventually able to repair the disk by writing zeroes to the entire drive (full erase) using another WD utility.

Overall Review: I still kept the disk since I was able to map out the bad sectors and it wasn't worth going through newegg's RMA process to exchange it.