The Acer Aspire One, Sure To Inspire You

I had been contemplating getting a Netbook, for some time before I actually did a search on Newegg for them. I figured they would be astronomically priced since they were new and just catching on. What I found surprised me in a good way. I could get a Netbook for under 400 dollars!
The choices in this price ranger included the MSI Wind, Acer Aspire One, and the Asus EEE. The Acer Aspire One Caught my eye right off with it's 299 price. I did some research and the Aspire One actually got decent reviews so I thought I would bite the bullet and order one.
Now a little back story for you all to explain some choices of mine. I had an old Dell Inspiron 8200 for many years (since 2001) and for the most part it was a decent laptop, except for the hard drive. I had replaced 3 hard drives in that laptop before finally selling it. This experience leaves me with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth when it comes to laptop hard drives and their durability. Since I never actually brought my old Dell anywhere and it had all those troubles I thought what will happen when I actually start traveling with my Netbook. This all lead me to choose the Solid State Drive for my Netbook.
Now I know most people out their cringe when they hear the amount of storage you can put on an SSD drive, but for me 16gb is plenty on a machine that will only be checking email and blogging. I have a beefy desktop PC for gaming and music, so I don't need all of the extra space. This actually leads me to the first feature that I love about the AAO, the SD expansion slot on the side. That's right all you have to do is slide in an SD card in the expansion slot and the Aspire One automatically combines it with your SSD. You don't even have to mess with drive letters or anything like that, just simple on the fly expansion.
Some other features include 3 USB 2.0 ports, another SD card slot, and video out . It also comes with some standard stuff like wireless, ethernet port, headphone and mic inputs, and even a webcam. The webcam is actually really decent I might add, and has great low light picture for only being 0.3mp. Again all of these features arn't really mind blowing, but lets remember the price and size of this thing...299 and the size of a hard cover book!
Since I was going with the SSD version I was thinking about speed, and of course that meant Linux as well. It comes with a flavor based off Fedora Core 7 called Linpus Lite. It's very icon driven and all about easy access to the things you use often and hiding the things you don't. Again this is fine for a casual user, don't worry you advanced users there is a way to get to all the other stuff as well. I have not actually timed the boot, but I would say its around 20 secs. This is great because when you are on the train or waiting at the airport between flights you don't want to spend a lot of your free time booting your laptop.
Now lastly a few drawbacks if I had to pick them. First off battery life. I get about 2 hours 30 mins on this 3 cell battery. There is a 6 cell model available, but it sticks out of the back to much for me. The battery life can also be reasoned away when you stop and think how long you actually need to check your email or chat with friends. If you want to use Skype for hours, just plug it into the wall. The keyboard is a little to small for me. I have small fingers, so I can imagine others having problems with it. At this point I have gotten used to the keyboard, but if you are writing anything of length it can get old quick. The last thing I will mention also has to do with typing, it's the damn touchpad. I'll be typing along and all the sudden brush the touchpad and next thing I know I'm typing up in the middle of some other paragraph. Again maybe I need to get used to this a bit more, but it can get frustrating.
I would have to say this Netbook is up in the top 5 best purchases I have made right along side my Garmin Nuvi. If you are looking for something cheap to do simple tasks online with, then look no further the Acer Aspire One delivers.

Going on Safari.... A Quick look at Safari 4 Beta

One can go absolutely crazy with the number of choices there are for web browsers these days.  Much of the world switched from IE to FireFox and Opera, now Google Chrome is a viable option, and finally Apple's OS:X default browser Safari is in version 4 beta.  

Safari has been an option for Windows users for some time, I myself ran it for about a week a year ago, and was very unimpressed.  This review will be another look at Safari for me and hopefully show a basic concept comparing it to Google's Chrome and Mozilla FireFox.  This review isn't going to go in depth on RSS feeds or rendering of all pages, it will just be a basic comparison for the average user who may be stuck on their "favorite" browser, in my case, Chrome.

To start off, I will give bit of information on what I like in a browser.  The browser needs to provide accurate rendering of web pages, smooth to operate and view pages, and provide quick use of history, bookmarks and tabs.  I also like a clean, small, practical interface (I was a huge fan of F11 back in the IE days).  Also as a final note, I switched from FireFox to Chrome for those very reasons, Chrome was much more responsive, had a cleaner interface, and to me provided a more practical use of tabs.  

Now to the good stuff.  I started off downloading the beta of Safari 4, noting that it was a 25MB download.  Once downloaded, the installer asked the usual stuff, but surprisingly didn't include the iTunes/Quick time push (must be due to being a beta).  Install time was less than 5 mins.  Once installed, the first run showed me the first thing I really didn't like, it was slow.  Mind you my workstation is a little dated: Intel P4 3.0GHZ 1GB of RAM and a 250GB Hard Drive.  But it shouldn't have taken almost 40secs to load.  Once loaded I was welcomed by a screen that showed me pages on a layout that would look native on a Mac or iPhone, not Windows.  Even though this was out of place in my opinion, it matched the functionality of Chrome's new tab page.  The next thing I noticed was that switching between Safari and other open programs then back, would make Safari bog trying to render the page again.  After browsing more pages, same results, slower performance than Chrome or FireFox, but it looked prettier....

The only good thing I can say for Safari at this point is that it seems to be a prettier version of Chrome, which tells me a lot of ideas were taken from Chrome in this release of Safari.  So if you have a beefy system or a Mac, or like the look of Apple programs running in Windows, go with Safari.  But if you want a browser that is going to function well, give you accurate rendering of pages with a little less eye candy and less bloat, stick with Chrome or FireFox.

The Importance of a Backup

Hard Drives are a wonderful piece of Technology.  They can hold huge amounts of data and are a key component of a computer.  They are also one of the few mechanical devices in a modern PC.  A Hard Drive has a number of components to make it work, a motor to spin the platters, and a servo to control the read/write head to name the major parts.  These parts are machined with precision, but unfortunately they fail, and without warning most times....

This is where making a backup becomes extremely important.  With today's hard drive sizes, people can store a ton of family pictures, school documents, and even home videos, which can all be lost in an instant.  I've had drives last 10+ years and I've had some that last a week.  Some fail quietly and slowly, others fail with tremendous noise that makes you want duck for cover.  

The most common failure I've seen is a head crash, which is literally that.  One of the read/write heads will actually "crash" into the surface of one of the platters, this makes a very audible noise much like a coffee grinder, and assures no data will be recoverable.  The other most common failure I've seen, seems to be a calibration problem.  The PC in question will have Windows write delay errors randomly, more frequently under heavy Hard Drive access.  Eventually the PC will blue screen or fail to boot.  Sometimes the PC can limp along like this for a good amount of time, but the longer you wait, the greater your chances of data recovery will be unlikely.

With USB flash drives becoming extremely inexpensive (around $60 for a 32GB model), backups become a lot more feasible.  There are a number of software products on the market that will do automatic backups or "one touch" backups to CD or DVD media as well.  Personally I use my 32GB flash drive and copy essential stuff between multiple PCs and a network Hard Drive I have access to.  Also, utilizing the Windows "My Documents, My Pictures and My Videos" folders, organizing data is easier, and is also easier to keep updated. 

This is a very basic outline of what can be done, there are many more ways to backup and secure data.  Many of these will be touched on in later posts.  But I hope that this can deliver some insite to the mechanical Hard Drive and put an emphasis on the importance of a backup.

Blackberry 8330 Falls Behind the Curve?

Now I have had my Blackberry Curve from T-Mo for close to a year now and I love it for the most part, but today I had a chance to look at the 8330 Curve. The specs on the 8330 are very close to the 8320 except, instead of having Wi-Fi it comes with GPS. After seeing the phone in action and using the GPS to navigate when I was down in the Outerbanks, I can say that it comes in handy for sure. I can also say there are times when I love the Wi-Fi feature of the 8320. It's great when you walk into a store and would normally lose signal, but the 8320 picks up an open Wi-Fi signal and keeps you plugged into the world. After weighing both these features, I think I would rather have the Wi-Fi. You can always go and pick up a Garmin for any navigation you need.

The screen on the 8330 is nice and bright, but it's now dated compared to the BB Bold that has hit the market. The Camera is also nice, but again falls behind some of the 5mp and even the 12mp mobile devices coming out. I have to say though, I am still a fan of having a physical keyboard to hammer out emails. The keyboard on the 8330 is very clicky, just like the 8320 and that is something I like better then the Bolds keys which are much softer.

Both models seem to be underpowered and have memory leak problems. This is rumored to be fixed in the new release of the Curve coming out, but with technology now days should this really be a problem? It seemed more like a way to cut cost, then an actual design flaw. Many other Smartphones are going to blow the Curve out of the water in the coming days, and with the BB Storm seeming like a flop Blackberry needs to release the new Curve ASAP.

Both are great phones and I would recommend them for anyone who spends a lot of time checking emails, surfing the web, and even taking pictures. If you are thinking about purchasing one anytime soon, you may want to wait a bit longer and check out some of the other more powerful Smartphones hitting the market.

Please bear with us...

We're still undergoing some changes to the blogs actual layout, so this may change on a random basis.

Review: Apevia PSU Tester

Our first review will cover a tool any good computer technician should have in their arsenal, something to test power supplies. One of the components that fails often in a computer is the power supply. Symptoms of a PSU failure can show up as a multitude of things, memory errors, generic Windows errors as well as random reboots and shutdowns. For this reason, troubleshooting the PSU first can save a lot of time, money and frustration.
The unit we use, and have used for about 6 months now, is produced by Apevia model# 311181-3. This seems to be a pretty generic unit, as I've seen it in different colors under different brand names. The device has a brushed aluminium body, and generic connectors for devices. It also features a nice blue back lit LCD. The unit can handle 20-pin and 24-pin ATX connectors, as well as +12volt, P8, P4, 6P PCI express, Floppy, Serial and standard 4-pin molex connectors.
Using the unit is straightforward, plug the power supply into a wall outlet, plug any of the connectors the PSU has, in any configuration and turn the PSU on. If the tester does not come on, the PSU is bad. If it comes on, the LCD will show you the voltages the PSU is putting out (as a note the LCD only gives voltage readouts for the 20-pin and 24-pin, and 12+).
The unit is nice and small, and is of good quality, it will handle rugged use just fine. The only major drawback to the unit is it will not put enough power draw on the PSU to show faults that occur when the PSU is in normal use, for this you still need to swap out a PSU to test, or use a volt meter. But, the tester is a great way to test a PSU when it first comes in, an un-known PSU and is easier than swapping a PSU out for first diagnosis. Also, it's cheaper than toasting a brand new motherboard.

Our First Post

Welcome to the our new blog, hopefully we can go long way in helping people who are interested in technology.  Our goal will be to give a non-bias view of a multitude of technology related products.  We'll be covering products for the consumer based market, as well as buisness related products. 

It will be a pleasure to publish this information and reviews, and we highly encourange comments from readers.