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Wayne L.

Wayne L.

Joined on 10/24/02

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 6
Most Favorable Review

Bargain Performance

EVGA GeForce 7600GT 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 SLI Support Graphics Card 256-P2-N550 -T2
EVGA GeForce 7600GT 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 SLI Support Graphics Card 256-P2-N550 -T2

Pros: Cheapest 7600GT out there and still provides great performance. Fan is very quiet, can't even hear it over the cpu and power supply fan which are both fairly quite.

Cons: Heatsink doesn't cover the memory chips, but I've even seen other brands that come overclocked with the same design. I have not overclocked.

Overall Review: Seems like a solid layout to the card and uses Nvidia reference drivers. I had a headache trying to remove the custom drivers that my MSI 6600GT used.

Most Critical Review

Mixed Feelings

Sennheiser Black CX200 3.5mm Connector Canal Stereo Headphone
Sennheiser Black CX200 3.5mm Connector Canal Stereo Headphone

Pros: Great sound compared to cheapy Sony's I had been using. Good noise isolation from exterior sounds.

Cons: Picks up sound any time the wires brusch up against your clothing or are touched. Was trying to eat an apple while wearing these and the chewing just echos through your head.

Overall Review: I'm not sure if the sound issue is common to all earbuds that go into your ear cannal or not as this was my first experience with that type. My previous earbuds just sit inside my ear lobe and don't actually go into the canal. May save these for use on planes to see if the noise isolation is a good enough replacement for active noise canceling. Should be sitting still anyways so the cord noise shouldn't be too bad for that.

Great drive

WD Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive
WD Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: Drive installed easily and seems to be working perfect. Lots of storage for the price and a 5 year warranty. Doesn't seem to create any more noise over the fan noise from the system.

Cons: Its not an SSD.

Overall Review: My current 500GB WD black drive had two partitions, one for system and applications and the other for games. That drive has worked perfectly for years but was getting low on space. Added this drive and copied all of the D drive contents over to it and then renamed the drives so the new drive shows up as the D drive. Going to eventually delete the old D drive partition and then resize the C drive to take up the entire 500GB drive. All of the reports of DOA drives kinda scared me, but WD drives have always seemed to have less failure rates than any other drive I have used and their warranty replacements have always been top notch if I was to have a problem. I did run a complete sector scan of the drive and found no errors.

So far so good

Linksys E2500-RM Advanced Simultaneous Dual-Band Wireless-N Router IEEE 802.3/3u, IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n
Linksys E2500-RM Advanced Simultaneous Dual-Band Wireless-N Router IEEE 802.3/3u, IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n

Pros: Great price on the refurbed unit. Seems to be working great so far. Getting 100% signal strength 1 floor up and 1 room over. HTPC is streaming very smooth now.

Cons: Still not as fast as 100mb wired connection, but still better than G. You have to buy new adapters for any devices that don't already support N if you want to take advantage of the additional speed.

Overall Review: Have not tested 5ghz yet as I don't have adapters that support them. I've had a G Linksys router for many years and it has always been great. Hopefully this one will be also. Decided to go with this refurb instead of one of the off brand names.

Works with Ubuntu

Edimax EW-7722In 300Mbps 11n Wireless PCI adapter with 2 x 3dBi Detachable Antennas
Edimax EW-7722In 300Mbps 11n Wireless PCI adapter with 2 x 3dBi Detachable Antennas

Pros: Was able to get it working with Ubuntu 10.4LTS and 11.10.

Cons: Did not work out of the box. I had to download the drivers from Ralink sites, make a couple of changes and then compile. I found info on the internet about how to do these things and I added instructions on what I did.

Overall Review: Tried another USB adapter that was supposed to work with 11.10 out of the box and couldn't get it working. This one took a little work, but at least I could tell the system was recognizing the internal device correctly. My Ubuntu HTPC streams movies smoothly now as opposed to my G adapter.

Get the replacement fan

ASUS A8N-E 939 NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra ATX AMD Motherboard
ASUS A8N-E 939 NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra ATX AMD Motherboard

Comments: Motherboard was great out of the box, then after a couple of weeks, the chipset fan started to whine. I called ASUS and they were aware of this common problem and shiped me an updated fan/heatsink which has a slightly larger fan that doesn't spin as fast (around 5K rpm). Much quieter now.