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Dmitry V.

Dmitry V.

Joined on 09/12/04

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 9
Most Favorable Review

Better than the picture

APEX MI-100 Black / Mirror finish Steel Mini-ITX Tower Computer Case 250W Power Supply
APEX MI-100 Black / Mirror finish Steel Mini-ITX Tower Computer Case 250W Power Supply

Pros: This is a small case with power supply. It looks better in real life than on the picture. Thanks to reviewer who mentioned one needs to peel off plastic film. :) You can easily take off front panel, no wires attached to it, which is convenient.

Cons: Tight fit for everything but space under external 5" and 3" drives seems to be wasted. Motherboard power cable is too short. LOUD power supply, had to mod it.

Overall Review: I got this to build noiseless audio recording station. Got fan-free JetWay J7F2WE1G2E-OC-LV motherboard with VIA Eaden processor 1.2GHz and Seagate ST3250410AS 250GB HDD. However noise produced by the power supply was absolutely unacceptable. I opened up power supply, took my soldering iron and moved fan from +12 to +5. After this mod PSU is virtually inaudible but still provides a little air flow, just enough to keep this low power board cool. At 50% CPU utilization it runs at 37C. Rock solid so far. Don't try this if you aren't experienced; there's high voltage inside PSU.

Most Critical Review

Bad frame like all the rest

Aluratek ADMPF110 10.5" 10.5" 800 x 600 TRUE DIGITAL Digital Photo Frame with 256MB Memory
Aluratek ADMPF110 10.5" 10.5" 800 x 600 TRUE DIGITAL Digital Photo Frame with 256MB Memory

Pros: Looks good when turned off. Acceptable size. Universal power supply (110-220 volts).

Cons: It cannot display pictures while connected to a PC. You have to disconnect it before it can display pictures! I was planning for a permanent installation and connection. Colors are poor. Very slow. Gets hot.

Overall Review: Digital frames have very big shoes to fit. Normal frames with paper pictures are perfect. They have excellent colors, work everywhere in the world, don't get hot, don't require any cords, and can be watched at any angle. I was avoiding digital frames until I decided to try this one for my parents as it had more or less acceptable reviews. It is no different than the rest. Poor colors and viewing angles! Why can't they use IPS LCD panels in these frames? The frame is slow, and gets hot. But inability to work when connected to a computer is a disaster. I lost thirty four dollars in this experiment on restocking and shipping and this is a lesson for me. Digital frames aren't acceptable yet.

Very unreliable!

ADATA 16GB Compact Flash (CF) Flash Card Model SPEEDY CF 16GB
ADATA 16GB Compact Flash (CF) Flash Card Model SPEEDY CF 16GB

Pros: Cheap, Large capacity

Cons: Performance is very unreliable.

Overall Review: Sometimes it works at 4-6 megabytes per second. Sometimes at 1-2 megabytes per second. On occasions it just stalls. Sometimed stalls are long enough for applications to keep trying and report corrupted data. My digital camera sometimes refuses to write to the card and power cycles.

CHEAP Monitor

SCEPTRE X24WG-1080P Black 24" 2ms Widescreen LCD Monitor 300 cd/m2 4000:1 w/ Built in Speakers & HDCP Support, US Warranty
SCEPTRE X24WG-1080P Black 24" 2ms Widescreen LCD Monitor 300 cd/m2 4000:1 w/ Built in Speakers & HDCP Support, US Warranty

Pros: Cheap, large, high resolution, DVI+VGA, cables included.

Cons: Ugly colors, worst picture quality, very narrow viewing angles, stuck pixel, so-so stand.

Overall Review: In this case you get what you pay for. I use excellent DELL 3007WFP-HC for editing photos but my wife needed monitor for editing music (notation and recordings). It had to be high-res but colors/picture weren't important. I decided to try X24WG out without setting expectations too high. Yet I was a little dissapointed. Usable viewing angle is about 30 degrees off-axes, at about 45 degrees picture already goes negative. Skin tones go ugly first. Gamma seems to be way too high. Don't see how dynamic contrast can be useful. When picture becomes dark, it reduces backlight in about 4 steps over about 3 sec. When picture becomes bright, it increases backlight. This effect is very visible and annoying. But back on track. If you don't need picture quality, just resolution - get this monitor. If you need picture quality even remotely, don't buy.

Inconsistent speed

Crucial Gizmo Jr 4GB Flash Drive (USB2.0 Portable) CT4GBUFDJNR000
Crucial Gizmo Jr 4GB Flash Drive (USB2.0 Portable) CT4GBUFDJNR000

Pros: Amazing form factor, large capacity.

Cons: Write speed is inconsistent. On some computers it goes up to 10Mbytes/sec on others it is as low as 170 Kbytes/sec. All computers have USB2.0 and are fairly recent.

Overall Review: Write speed seems to be dependent on where data is located on the chip. Speed varies significantly during file copy. It may go 5Mbytes/sec for the first 10 minutes, then drop to 170 Kbytes/sec for next 10 minutes, then go up again.

Driver crashes often

MSI Radeon HD 2400PRO Support up to 512M(256MB onboard) GDDR2 PCI Express x16 Graphics Card RX2400PRO-TD256EH
MSI Radeon HD 2400PRO Support up to 512M(256MB onboard) GDDR2 PCI Express x16 Graphics Card RX2400PRO-TD256EH

Pros: Supports 2560x1600 over dual-link DVI. Fanless.

Cons: Driver crashes often (once per day). Good thing it has ability to recover from crashes without system restart. You need to select this option.

Overall Review: I got this as a cheap card that can drive my 30" DELL monitor. I use mostly 2D apps and very little 3D (Google Earth and Virtual Earth). This card works fine and fast enough for me when it works. However, I had troubles with driver from MSI. It would crash all the time taking whole system down. I replaced driver wirh one from Radeon site (AMD). It is much more stable but still crashes about once a day.