Joined on 07/07/08
Kensington Slimblade set
Pros: Wireless range is fantastic. Lightweight. VERY compfortable mouse and positive feeling short-throw chicklet keys. Excellent battery life.
Cons: The mouse ball cannot be cleaned.
Overall Review: EVERYTHING about this keyboard set is quality. Very nice keys; quiet, positive feeling. Keyboard function even works in BIOS, meaning it's recognized as a USB keyboard and appears to the I/O as "present". Mouse does, as well, but not on all computers. Loved by Ubuntu and Windows. Special function keys all work without having to install any stupid third party software. (I hate third-party software.) My ONLY complaint is that the hard plastic scroll ball eventually gets plugged and slick, and the scroll function becomes "iffy", and the nice quality feel goes out the window; the scroll ball gets a "stiction", and no longer rolls smoothly. Only thing I can consider at this moment to clean the parts below might be a plastic-safe electronics parts cleaner. Hate to toss a $140.00 keyboard because the scroll doesn't work perfectly.
BEST drive upgrade. Period.
Pros: Low power. No noise. Speed. Compatibility. TRIM support. (Not *all* SSDs support TRIM yet! Make sure you're comparing apples to apples!) TRIM support makes certain your write speeds are always fast! Must have an AHCI compatible BIOS for this to work, though.
Cons: None found yet.
Overall Review: I swore that when SSDs dropped to under a buck a gig, I'd have one. I did a lot of research before I decided on this one, and I haven't been disappointed yet. I know that my old laptop only has a SATAII interface, but until I get one with a faster one, I just know that my drive will NEVER be my bottleneck. Drive benchmarks in Ubuntu show the bus is saturated, and even at that point, Ubuntu is so fast it hurts my feelings! Dual booting Win7 and Ubuntu offers me under 10 second desktops (under 25 seconds from power-on). Either OS is NOTICEABLY snappier. Longer battery life, and a cooler running laptop are just the proverbial "icing on the cake". A completely un-regretted $400.00 expenditure. Laptop is a Compaq V6444US, dual-core with 4GB RAM. A workhorse it has been, and with this upgrade, I'll be able to extend its useful life at least another 12 to 18 months, PLUS still have a nice, fast SATAIII SSD for my next laptop when I finally do replace this one! Happy Camper!
Good LAWD!
Pros: I've never seen anything load apps this fast... EVER!
Cons: Price. Compatibility.
Overall Review: Well... I thought it was fast before. Once I got the thing loaded up with Windows, it was fast, no lying there. I ran benchmarks on it, and WEI reported a 7.9, I was shocked! I love this thing! Tonight, I remembered that some people said that there were issues with the write-cache buffer flushing. Disable it. I never store anything ON my C: drive anyway, so data loss isn't a big deal, PLUS, I have a 1500W UPS backing up my power. Oh. Em. Gee. Response times are UN-BE-FREAKING-LIEVEABLE!!! My liquid cooled, OC'd, i7 is now no longer wasted! LOL CS3 loads LITERALLY in the blink of an eye. DVD playback application, the same. Installs are so fast they hurt my feelings! Primary hard drive WEI is probably about 14.4, now... :) The price of entry on this thing is astroNOMICAL, but if you want the fastest data transfer money can buy, THIS is it. I wasn't disappointed before, but NOW... Wow.