Pros: Fast brewing, solid construction, 500 watts
Cons: Doesn't have the traditional clear plastic top to show it perking.
Overall Review: Nobody makes 'em like they used to. Black And Decker bought then ruined the Farberware Superfast coffee maker. Farberware also a hefty 1000 watts vs. this sweet Presto at 500 watts. So, this little maker is twice as efficient and a bit safer for older electrical wiring. It's not quite as solid as the old percolators they used to make decades ago, but it's not of poor quality either. With everyone ramming drip coffee makers down out throats, I am very happy to see someone still making a good 'ol percolator. It takes about 9-10 minutes to make a full pot with water at room temperature and it tastes about as good as a French Press. I'm using #2 coffee filters - I have to punch a hole in the bottom of the filter, but it wraps up around the edges of the coffee to keep most of the grinds out, unlike the disc filters. I've added a mechanical timer to make coffee in the morning before I wake up.
Pros: This is a clever design. All the connectors and electronics are on the side which opens. Rather than dropping in a drive and crossing your fingers that it will mate up on the other end this allows you to connect the drive first. It also allows you to troubleshoot it before closing the case. It's much smaller than most external drive cases. Solid brushed aluminum case keeps fingerprints off. Space saving brick power supply. On/off switch. And, LEDs which aren't so bright requiring black tape to tone them down.
Cons: If I had to really be picky I would say the plastic could have been made to look a little more pleasing in the rear of the case but this doesn't distract from the design. This is USB only, no firewire.
Overall Review: There's a sticker on the inside which advises people to format new drives before using them. Ok, who has been phoning into tech support because their harddrive wasn't formatted? I bought a bare drive and dropped it in. OS X could not read the drive and it did not show up in Disk Utility. I needed to partition it on Windows, half NTFS, then went back to the Mac and formatted the other partition as FAT. I'm sure it was something I was doing wrong but it works fine now. Under Windows, I can read/write to the whole drive. Under OS X, I can read/write to the FAT half while NTFS is read-only (for the moment)
Pros: Effective, battery operated, carry case, easy to clean.
Cons: No complaints
Overall Review: This highly effective trimmer replaces a non-motorized trimmer. My previous trimmer's blades would spin as I squeezed a lever. The result was a most painful ripping of many nose hairs. After this experience I decided to spend a little money and get something really good, perhaps something with a motor. The blades are very sharp and do a nice job. It's painless and the cutter is easy to clean.
Pros: Slim design, vertical or horizontal operation, firewire/usb, easy to replace/upgrade drives, small power supply
Cons: A little expensive
Overall Review: This is hands-down the best external drive enclosure I've used. Unbelievably, it's smaller than dedicated external drives I've used from Maxtor and Buffalo. Swapping out the SATA drive takes nothing more than flip a lever and unscrew four screws. If you order an extra cage, you can setup additional drives to swap in and out in less than a minute - although, I'm unsure how the contacts would hold up to using it like a docking station. I used a Seagate 250gig drive and formatted it GUID/HPFS for Mac OS X under Tiger. The drive came right up under firewire. The performance is better than my existing internal drive. I was able to boot the Mac easily off the drive.
Pros: Looks great on the table. Perfect for tea for two. The glass construction lets you brew to exactly to the desired strength.
Cons: The glass cover tends to fall off when you pour tea. Then again, most ceramic tea pots I've tried will do that. It's a tad awkward to pour, but takes up less space on the table.
Pros: Slick looking and looks great on the desktop. I purchased this 7 port hub to replace a 4 port hub and already found a use for the additional expansion. I have a mac mini and have tried this hub with an external DVD drive, USB fax modem, and USB external hard drive. All work without problems. The power indicator goes dark when the computer sleeps.
Cons: A tad pricey, but it looks good and is well-built.
Pros: Received a prompt RMA number from Kingston.
Cons: Early in 2008 I purchased five Kingston sdhc cards. An exhaustive memory test passed. They worked fine in my Pentax K20 digital camera. Later in 2008 I purchased another five Kingston sdhc cards. But, I was only able to shoot about 5 to 10 photos before the camera reported memory read and write errors on all 5 cards. After returning them, Kingston swapped the bad cards for 5 more bad cards from THE SAME LOT. I would rather throw these bad memory cards into the trash and loose money rather than let Kingston sell them to another unsuspecting consumer. Something happened at Kingston between Spring of 2008 and Fall of 2008. My guess is they switched their manufacturing process for the worse. Their customer service used to respond to emails but no longer. A lifetime warranty does no good if they only swap your bad memory with more bad memory.
Overall Review: Don't put your trust in brand names.
Pros: Great for laptops as an alternative to the trackpad
Cons: Crashed OS X when turned off
Overall Review: OS X is a little cranky when it looses a USB device, so I should have anticipated that Bluetooth mouse wasn't the ideal device for a mac. When I turned the mouse off, OS X appeared to go into a "panic" reboot. I bought the mouse for my WinXP laptop, so no worries. It has a 2-3 second hibernation if there is no movement, then it takes a little while for it to wake up, making the cursor jerky. Best way to overcome this is to reduce the tracking speed to diminish the effect. Overall - it's better than a touchpad, but avoid using on a mac laptop.
Pros: This is a great little point and shoot camera for candid shots. It's tiny, easy to clip onto your belt and carry it around all day. Large LCD screen, easy to navigate menus which gives you what you're looking for fairly quickly. It has many features not found on other similar models, some of which include a separate setting for brightness, contrast, and color saturation, manual focus, excellent white balance selection and easy to use manual white balance, auto ISO selection, and anti-shake. It has a collection of "Best Shot" images which are presets for the most common situations, including night shots, backlit, fireworks, and portraits - which have helpful comments to let you know what each preset does. For close-up and indoor photos, this is a wonderful camera under a variety of lighting.
Cons: Outdoor shots and landscape images do not quite sparkle as well as a high-end digital SLR, but only a professional photographer would be able to tell the difference. I found the outdoor images a bit flat, so am I still tweaking the contrast and saturation settings for the best images.
Overall Review: I purchased extra Impact replacement batteries and charger, rather than using the cradle to charge it - but, that's a matter of personal preference. The camera allows you to quickly swap out the battery or the memory card if either becomes used up. This camera should take up to 4gig mmc+ cards, although the 1gig mmc+ 200x are better for movies. Highly recommended. Simple enough for the average person to use while having enough features to make a professional photographer happy.
Pros: Versatile Powerful Inexpensive Compact Multiple power options
Cons: Might be confusing to setup
Overall Review: I own five of these little boxes. Every time I want to add wireless ability to a wired device I buy another one. Whenever I want to connect to a wireless network without installing drivers and messing with Windows settings, I buy another one. Recently I had a chance to use a different mode of this gadget. I wanted to create a WiFi private network from a simple DSL Ethernet jack coming out of the wall. No problem-o. Just set the mode and configure it with the PC, then plug it into the jack of the modem and you've got yourself your own private network. On earlier versions of the firmware there was occasion where it would come up in a foreign language rather than English. But, I took that more of a challenge than an obstacle.