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Randall P.

Randall P.

Joined on 10/28/05

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Product Reviews
product reviews
  • 5
Most Favorable Review

Excellent Product

BELKIN F7D4101 Play N600 Wireless Adapter IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n USB 2.0 Up to 300Mbps Wireless Data Rates
BELKIN F7D4101 Play N600 Wireless Adapter IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n USB 2.0 Up to 300Mbps Wireless Data Rates

Pros: Fast, easy setup, good range.

Cons: Nothing.

Overall Review: Belkin customer service is amazing, I picked up an N150 adapter and found that it couldn't connect at more than 54mbps using wireless security, and had poor range. I emailed belkin with these complaints, they sent me a detailed explanation of the problem and offered to send me an N300, they actually sent me the N600DB and it is perfect. Had my connections up and running in under a minute, I get 12ms ping and my full network speed.

Most Critical Review

Feature packed motherboard at a good price

GIGABYTE GA-AB350-GAMING 3 (rev. 1.0) AM4 AMD B350 USB 3.1 HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard
GIGABYTE GA-AB350-GAMING 3 (rev. 1.0) AM4 AMD B350 USB 3.1 HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard

Pros: Tons of expansion, has USB 3 Gen 2 ports and NVME, as well as a ton of PCI-e and SATA ports, more than enough for any gaming desktop and at a good price. Install and setup was very easy, wouldn't POST at first but it had LEDs to indicate what failed, CPU kept lighting up so I simply reseated the CPU and it booted up fine, this feature made troubleshooting only take a couple minutes, had windows installing 1 hour after I started rebuilding my whole system. It has some cool RGB lights on it and lots of headers for fans and water pumps, as well as some advanced controls for these devices. Overclocking with it is pretty easy. Came with a free coaster and some nice black SATA cables to match the board. It has received regular BIOS updates and instability and RAM compatibility issues it had at launch have been fixed, I just bought it so it was already on the F6 firmware and had no issues.

Cons: The Gigabyte APP center software is really glitchy and slow, most things in it don't work properly but can be done the old fashioned way in the BIOS. It sets this program to run at startup and every time I reboot it says updates are ready, but there are no updates it just wants me to install more programs, some of them will pretend to install but actually won't, like game booster for example. It also set my water pump to not run at all when the CPU wasn't under heavy load, this caused some issues but was easily fixed with a tweak to the fan settings in BIOS.

Overall Review: Edit: I dropped it from 4 eggs to 3 because I've been running into issues with the VRMs overheating. They were reaching as high as 110C with good airflow in my case which would cause instability, I had to disable XFR boost on my 1700x, then I installed powerful 120mm fans on the top and side of my case blowing on the VRMs. This fixed the instability when it's boosting, but it still runs really hot. I would not recommend this motherboard if you want to overclock or are using one of the higher end Ryzen CPUs.

Not good for gaming

Logitech M705 Marathon Wireless Mouse, 2.4 GHz USB Unifying Receiver, 1000 DPI, 5-Programmable Buttons, 3-Year Battery, Compatible with PC, Mac, Laptop, Chromebook - Black
Logitech M705 Marathon Wireless Mouse, 2.4 GHz USB Unifying Receiver, 1000 DPI, 5-Programmable Buttons, 3-Year Battery, Compatible with PC, Mac, Laptop, Chromebook - Black

Pros: Long battery life, reliable, back/forward buttons, good wireless range.

Cons: Low sensitivity, tracking feels off, loose scroll wheel

Overall Review: I use this from my couch, PC is hooked up to a TV. It does a good job at basic tasks, the 10ft wireless range I get from that tiny receiver is impressive, I've owned this mouse for over a year and it's still on the original batteries. It's a pretty solid mouse, the reason I gave it 2 eggs is because it is worthless for gaming, the laser is way off to the side so it just doesn't feel right, when I was using an MX518 all it took was a small twitch of the wrist to do a 180 and shoot some guy in the face, this thing just feels clunky. I also hate the scroll wheel, it is loose and seems to scroll a couple more lines after I let go of it, scrolling seems to be either the whole page or hardly anything, after tweaking the settings and installing a plugin for chrome it is usable but still not very good.

Mediocre mouse at a low price

Microsoft Wireless Mobile Mouse 3500 GMF-00046 Gold 1 x Wheel USB RF Wireless BlueTrack Mouse
Microsoft Wireless Mobile Mouse 3500 GMF-00046 Gold 1 x Wheel USB RF Wireless BlueTrack Mouse

Pros: Cheap, Works pretty well for a notebook.

Cons: Too small for my hands, bluetrack technology is no better than a normal red LED mouse, poor wireless range.

Overall Review: This mouse is clearly intended for a laptop and not much else. I hooked it up to my desktop about 6ft from where I use it and it barely works at that range. Not very accurate without a mouse pad. Prior to using this mouse I had a logitech MX518 that was 7 years old, had all of it's feet missing and was nearly falling apart and it felt better and more accurate than this.

Excellent MP3 player

SanDisk Sansa Clip 1.0" Black 1GB MP3 Player
SanDisk Sansa Clip 1.0" Black 1GB MP3 Player

Pros: Excellent sound quality, it has no background noise whatsoever, not even with music paused and on full volume. It's really small, simple interface, yet it has a lot of features for such a cheap Mp3 player. Files can be dragged on dropped onto it simply with windows media player. Has a rechargeable battery.

Cons: Headphones that come with it are junk, 1gb is not much space.

Overall Review: Update your firmware, the latest update adds support for Ogg vorbis, it also fixes a lot of bugs and makes the clip a much better mp3 player.