Archive for February, 2010

Akasa Freedom Tower CPU Cooler Review

Akasa Freedom Tower CPU Cooler

UK Price (as reviewed): £28.74 (inc VAT)
US Price (as reviewed): $42.95 (ex tax)

Weight: 774g
Size (without fan): 120 x 92 x 160mm (W x D x H)
Warranty: 1 Year
Supported Sockets: Intel: LGA775, LGA1156, LGA1366. AMD: Socket AM2/AM2+/AM3

CPU coolers need to be efficient, cheap and easy to install, and it’s the latter of this trilogy of virtues that seems to cause a lot of difficulty for many companies. Some coolers ship with an accessories box that you could barely tell apart from a Meccano set. While the classic toy is undeniably a great creation in its own right, it’s the last thing you want to fiddle with when the promise of bigger overclocks is on the horizon. It’s almost as if there’s a secret competition between manufacturers to determine which one can make the most ludicrously complicated and annoying mounting system.

For this reason, Akasa deserves kudos for the mounting system of its new Freedom Tower cooler. Four spring-loaded screws are attached to the cooler and screw directly into a backplate through the motherboard. End of story. What’s more, the cooler uses the same system for Intel LGA775 and LGA1366 motherboards.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

For AMD Socket AM2/AM2+/AM3 boards, Akasa has adopted the equally numpty-proof retention arm used by the AMD reference cooler. If the cooling ability of the Freedom Tower proved to be up to the same standard as the installation system, we reckoned we were going to be on to a winner.

At first glance, the Freedom Tower’s construction resembles that of the highly effective Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme 1366 RT, which can only be a good omen for our testing. Four heatpipes run through the baseplate, and these have been smoothed down so that they make direct contact with the CPU heatspreader. The 120mm fan mount can be unclipped from the heatsink, and the fan unscrewed, should you want to replace the supplied 120mm fan with your favourite model. The plastic used for the fan mount and fan feels cheap and bendy, even if the gloss finish and four white LEDs are welcome.

A braided fan cable ends in a 4-pin PWM fan connector, allowing the fan to adjust its speed according to the temperature of the heatsink (and therefore your CPU). PWM is preferable to motherboard-based fan control, as it offers finer control of fan speed, and therefore keeps unwelcome noise to a minimum.

Solid Ink Doesn’t Fit Every Printer But If You Want it You Can Certainly Find it on the Net With Ease

You’ll easily locate solid ink on the current market – you simply need to find out where to take a look. Have a browse on a variety of online pages and see what you will find. If you ever undertake a lot of lookups in the search engines you’ll more than likely be confronted with a few promotions and discounts that are worth it.

Whatever you might be browsing for on the net, you should have very little troubles acquiring the thing you need. You can find a huge range of options readily available this means you should never have any difficulty in the least finding very good deals which might be perfect for your expectations. You will have to take your time while you’re surfing around the world wide web to ensure you’re aware regarding everything on today’s market.

There’s lots of possibilities from which to choose and you could possibly find it complicated to make a decision. Well, if that is the case then you need to keep reading to discover ways to select the perfect services for your desires. You will probably want to set yourself a spending plan so that you do not overspend and waste your money on a deal that’s not of great benefit.

The foremost thing you should think about is the kind of investment you are intending on. This will be a vital factor of the selections and so be sure you know very well what you are considering before you decide anything at all or agree to anything. It is crucial you are made tuned in to all the things on the market today so that you can make knowledgeable choices.

You may then need to think about the type of solid ink on the market today and do your homework to uncover what choices would be better suited for your requirements. It may be really straightforward to come across what you are seeking for if you hit the internet and have a good browse around.

If you have had a good look into it via the internet you ought to realize that there are several possible choices available. Have a very good read and do a few searches on the internet to discover what comes up. You’ll likely be blown away at the quality of choice for this kind of uncomplicated investment.

Writer Josh A Andrews talks about finding solid ink online. www.solid-inks.co.uk has a large range of options available, you will easily find what you need.

x fi home theater hd sound card unboxing

Here it is, the Long awaited x-fi home theater hd sound card. Please see video # 2 the install www.youtube.com and the final demonstration www.youtube.com I’m the first person in the world to do a live review of the card and I had it express overnighted to me via UPS. PC users watching blue ray this is the only way in the world right now to have hd sound from your pc to your receiver! There is no other way! The card retails from Azuentech for 9.00. here is the link, www.auzentech.com

How You Can Troubleshoot An External Drive

Although adding an outside journeying should be easier than adding an intrinsic route, sometimes these devices, too, do a leaving act on your system after you’ve connected them.

If this happens to you, foremost invoice to egest certain everything is securely abutting. A USB manoeuvre that is not plugged in aright is a vulgar make of an unobserved propulsion. Close, if everything appears to be decently contiguous, go through the troubleshooting steps outlined in the attendant article. An external intend should materialize if you examine its proximity with the Device Handler and Plough Management. Nonetheless, if your foreign emblem noneffervescent isn’t attending in My Computer, try this set, which carries the Figure Handler learn a bit farther.

Initial, with your method overturned off, disparity the propulsion from your grouping and then cause up your machine. Succeeding, unlawful the Emblem Administrator using either of the routes mentioned in this article.

From the Vista list, select Evince Hidden Devices. If your outside propulsion is a USB instrumentality, you should see ternion items recorded in the Pattern Manager: the analyze of the ram under Disk Drives, the obloquy of the USB patron transcriber, and USB Mass Storage Style under Coupling Serial Bus controllers. If you see these items, right-click each of them and take Uninstall from the circumstance schedule. Restart your system if you are prompted to do so.

Now, with the external get console split from your group, stoppage it into a powerfulness thing and flop it on. Be uncomplaining and let the force full dissever, ready for it to disrupt making the spinning trouble ordinarily associated with a locomote that is in the deliver of initializing. Eventually, tie the foreign thrust into your PC and see if it appears in My Computer.

For hard drive check cheap 1tb hard drive internal,cheap ide hard drives etc.

Intel DX58so Motherboard Review

In the following video I will show a really nice Intel Motherboard from the extreme series of intel boards and it is the dx58so Motherboard. This motherboard goes for about 0, and while it is not cheap it is a great board to go with an i7 Processor. Remember to visit www.aramistech.com for the complete review on this product. This review is sponsored by www.eiphost.com.

Dell XPS M1330 Review

www.notebookreview.com Dell recently announced the XPS M1330 a 13.3″ widescreen ultraportable and ultra sexy notebook that uses the Intel Santa Rosa platform. Equipped with an available dedicated Nvidia 8400m graphics, slot loading optical drive, LED backlit display, and integrated web-camera, the M1330 is less than 1″ thin at the front and weighs in at 4lbs. The following is a quick first take on the Dell M1330.

Kingston SSDNow V+ Series 128GB SNVP325-S2B/128GB

Kingston Technology Company, Inc. is the world’s independent memory leader.


Founded in 1987 with a single product offering, Kingston now offers more than 2,000 memory products that support nearly every device that uses memory, from computers, servers and printers to MP3 players, digital cameras and mobile phones. In 2009, the company’s sales reached $4.1 billion.


With global headquarters in Fountain Valley, California, Kingston employs more than 4,000 people worldwide. Regarded as one of the “Best Companies to Work for in America” by Fortune magazine, Kingston’s tenets of respect, loyalty, flexibility and integrity create an exemplary corporate culture. Kingston believes that investing in its people is essential, and each employee is a vital part of Kingston’s success.


Kingston serves an international network of distributors, resellers, retailers and OEM customers on six continents. The company also provides contract manufacturing and supply chain management services for semiconductor manufacturers and system OEMs.


http://www.kingston.com/company/default.asp

Windows Phone 7 Series Takeaway

2 years, 9 months and 15 days. That’s how long it’s been since Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer shrugged off the competition during an interview after the iPhone’s public unveiling, until the announcement of Windows Phone 7 Series at Mobile World Congress. Since then, the smartphone market has rapidly evolved, and Windows Mobile has seen fierce and rapidly evolving competition. We’ve seen the introduction of two major revisions of Android and iPhone OS, incremental OS updates from RIM with BlackBerry OS, and full-on platform reboots from both Palm and Nokia. All the while, Windows Mobile has remained relatively the same, receiving subtle updates and slowly slipping from being a dominant player with almost 40% market share, to an increasingly marginalized platform showing serious age. 

It isn’t much of a leap to see how much a complete platform reboot was needed.

Although the details that have been revealed thus far are relatively scant, it’s safe to say one thing – Phone 7 Series is Microsoft’s attempt to wipe its mobile platform of Pocket PC heritage, and instead rebuild with a new UI paradigm that does away entirely with the old. Gone are the throwbacks to Windows CE: its stylus driven interface, task manager, implicit multitasking, and start menu.

Instead, they’ve been replaced with something radically different and refreshing for Microsoft. The Phone 7 Series UI has taken nods from the typographically-driven user interfaces that Microsoft has designed in the past and given it the capacitive multitouch treatment. The Zune HD interface is what most point to (and rightfully so), but this typography-dominated style actually traces all the way back to the interface designed for Windows Media Center, and even borrows UI elements from the NXE Xbox dashboard, according to Windows Phone Program Management Joe Belfiore. Microsoft calls this style codename “Metro.”

9056f picturesscreen web Windows Phone 7 Series Takeaway

Although we haven’t seen all of it yet, software is grouped into “Hubs.” Microsoft has shown People, Pictures, Games, Music + Video, Marketplace, and Office very prominently as examples. The usual suspects are also present: Phone, SMS, Calendar, Email, Internet Explorer, and Bing search + maps. All of these applications have been given a hearty helping of “metro” design; simple rectangular shapes of color on a black background for a relatively spartan yet invitingly simple appearance. By their own admission, much of the experience still isn’t fleshed out in its entirety, and placeholders still abound. But Microsoft is being forthcoming here by noting that much more will be shown at MIX10. 

A chief UI differentiator is the integration of what Microsoft is calling “tiles.” Instead of adopting a strictly unitasking workflow, Microsoft hopes to leverage inactive display by using tiles that reflect constantly updated data. Although details are scarce regarding how much freedom developers will have with what can be shown, this functionality is essentially expected to  mitigate the platform’s lack of traditional multitasking. 

Microsoft believes so strongly in this UI that they’re disallowing modification to it by both carriers and manufacturers. 

The Right Series And Portability Of A Samsung Laptop

Available in many sizes and designs, the Samsung laptop is a superior product to many of those notebooks available today. Their different series of laptops offer a wide variety of networking for just about anybody’s needs. Samsung is usually the leader when it comes to releasing new and innovative products and the company is known for selling quality computers at a reasonable price.

With the N-series of laptops, the consumer is offered small, lightweight netbook like computers. These are great when it comes to low tech usage such as sending and receiving E-mails as well as surfing the net. While fairly simple in use, the N-series also offers the cutting edge of technology. These are also quite stylish and one can be chosen to fit your needs and style.

The P-series is also known as the professional series. These notebooks are designed for commuters and business people who are typically on the move. They are powerful machines designed to work well and look professional in boardroom meetings. Samsung’s track record of excellence really shows with the P-series. They are high performance models that can help accomplish any task needed while away on business.

The X-series of laptops is their ultra thin series. This style is extremely mobile and lightweight. However, for their size, they pack a lot of power. Equipped with the latest technology in processors, the X-series is able to incorporate communication technologies as well as a variety of multimedia technologies. This series is also equipped with high definition LED screens. For work or play, this gives the user maximum enjoyment.

One of the most popular of the Samsung laptops is the R-series. This product is the top of the line entertainment series in laptops available. Equipped with high definition viewing, movies, videos and games are all crystal clear whether you are watching at home or playing on the road. This is the perfect laptop for the ultra gamer who wants to feel like they are in their favorite video game.

One of the newest lines of Samsung notebooks is their Q-series for the style conscious. These are designed with both innovative multimedia and fantastic communication capabilities. They are great for students who want power and style all in one portable design. They are also great for business travelers as well as those looking for small and portable connectivity.

The Samsung laptop not only has some of the lightest and most portable laptops, they have some of the most powerful ones as well. The productivity of the Samsung is superior to many of those on the market today. And as the technology gets better, you can be assures that Samsung will follow suit.

Andrew Johnson is an expert in electronic consumables. If you want more information about varieties of Samsung laptop or are looking for a trusted laptop retailer please visit http://www.ebuyer.com

Unboxing the Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3 – Video

f8100 s10 3 unboxed Unboxing the Lenovo IdeaPad S10 3 – VideoLenovo IdeaPad S10-3 is one of the slickest looking 10 inch netbooks I’ve seen in a while. The folks at Lenovo sent me one to review this week, and I’ve posted the unboxing video below.

The lid features a fingerprint-resistant, texture pattern. The demo model Lenovo sent me is red, and while I don’t usually favor red laptops, it’s quite nice looking. It’s subdued enough to make the laptop look a little flashy without looking silly.

The keyboard has an isolation-style layout, with flat keys and a little space between each key. I’m still not a fan of Lenovo’s insistence on putting the Fn key on the far left side of the keyboard where most PC makers place a Ctrl key. But I’m starting to get used to it and so I grumble a little less each time I unbox a Lenovo laptop.

The palm rest has a brushed metal look and feel, which carries over to the touchpad. I’m fairly certain it’s actually made of plastic, but the aesthetic is quite nice.

One interesting change from previous Lenovo laptops is the placement of the power button on the screen bezel instead of above the keyboard. When you add the fact that Lenovo has done away with individual touchpad buttons, this netbook is a little slimmer and lighter than previous models.

I’ll have more thoughts on the S10-3 after I’ve had time to test it. For now, you can check out the unboxing video after the break.