Da-Banana

For about a month now I've owned the new Samsung T260HD. This is a big monitor with HDTV capability. This monitor is magnificent. So, first lets start with its benefits. First, its big. This monitor allows you to view so much stuff at once. You can easily have a browser, chat, console and music player up and running and not interfering with each other. The monitor has a nice menu system that allows you to control all its features. You can easily switch between the different inputs and there isn't a long delay when switching. The best feature of this monitor though is that it can do 1080p resolution. Actually, its does higher than 1080p, so when you're running 1080p, you'll actually have black space on the top and bottom. The monitor doesn't auto adjust to the correct aspect ratio but it can with a click of a button on the remote. It also remember the last ratio for that input...so as long as you are not changing your resolutions often, its not a problem. Now for the...

I've had my magicJack for over a month now and I have been very impressed with it. I sometimes am required to work from home and only had a cell phone, like a lot of people. This was a problem though because I would sometimes have conferences calls and would have to eat up my minutes. MagicJack was mentioned to me and it sounded like the solution to my problem. So far, this is turning out to be exactly that. With magicJack I can make calls from home for work and it doesn't cost me anything. Just the $20 a year service and Internet connection. The magicJack has many nice features including a address book, callerID, 411 service and voicemail, all included in the normal price. The voicemail even sends you an email with the voicemail as an attachment. A feature I was going to recommend, only to find out they already implemented it. As good as the device is there are some drawbacks. The major drawback is that in order to use the device it must be hooked to a computer that is u...

Well, my old computer has now been replaced. I've upgraded to a new faster dual-core system. I'm an AMD fan so I went with the Athlon X2 5000+ Black Edition. This processor is awesome. It runs cool at stock speeds but has the capability to be heavily overclocked. For cooling I used the Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro. The CPU stays at a temperature of around 25 degrees. The case I chose is the Antec P180 (black). This case keeps everything nicely spaced out and running cool and quiet. The case is very heavy but has all the features needed. The power supply is stored down below in a separate compartment so it doesn't get heated from the CPU and video card. The power supply chosen is a 700w model from Thermaltake with cable management. This power supply is very nice and fits nicely in the case. It is also very quiet which is what I wanted and designed the computer to be. For the video card I chose was the PowerColor ATI x1950 512mb Pro with a Artic Cooling cooler. This ...

I received a motherboard and CPU that were having issues. The CPU was a Athlon 2600+ and the motherboard was an ASUS A7V600. Something was wrong with one of these two devices but it was unknown to me which, but my guess was at the motherboard, specifically the BIOS. I did some reading and found many articles on this motherboard. I was trying to find ways of trying to flash the BIOS without getting a full boot. After many hours of reading through dreadful amounts of forums I came across someone that said to remove the video card and boot with only a floppy attached. This would then force the motherboard into the most basic of programming and have it boot from the floppy looking for a BIOS to use and update. (This is only with the ASUS A7V600 to my knowledge) I did all the necessary stuff and the floppy started to run, I was so pumped. I waited several minutes until it was done. Let it go a while after that then I shut it down and placed the video card into the slot and started it up. Un...

Over a month ago I purchased a Samsung 940BX. I had the 15.4 inch widescreen monitor but I just wanted something a little larger for my main computer. I did some searching around but I eventually settled down with the Samsung. It was highly regarded and seemed to be the best priced for the quality. I must say, I'm quite impressed. It has a height adjustment that that allows you with enough room to get it as high or low as you need it. The colors on the monitor are quite bright. I noticed a difference in quality the second I booted it up. The screen also auto-adjusts and I've never even had to manually adjust it. Way better than my old CRT monitor which I had to adjust every time I changed resolutions. There is no annoying notification either, it just handles it perfectly. As for games and movies, I haven't had any issues. It has great picture and response time. I haven't noticed any ghosting or issues with it not refreshing fast enough. The viewing angle is also quite d...

I love using Linux. Earlier this year I purchased Doom 3 for the sole purpose of being able to play a high end game in Linux. I finished that game up a while ago and was once again wanting to have something in Linux. The next game I naturally chose was Quake 4. I love ID software for producing everything needed for these games to run native in Linux, and for that I'm gladly willing to support them so that they keep creating wonderful Linux games. I hope that other company will follow there example. The game arrived and I was very eager to give it a try. Once I installed the game I remembered that a major thing had changed in my computer since I had ran Doom 3. This change was my video card. I had changed from my Nvidia card, known for its quality driver in Linux to an ATI who hasn't had, in previous years, the greatest Linux drivers. Well, I installed the game and tried starting it up. I received then an error stating 'GL_ARB_texture_compression not found', then I would...

I've had a Gravis controller for several years. It was a nice contoller with two analog sticks and buttons galore but it had one major problem. Its drivers were horrible. I would install the drivers and the contoller would work for a while, but eventually it starts acting up. I'll plug it in but it wouldn't work until I would reboot the computer. Just recently I bought the new game Marvel Alliance. When I tried to start the game with my Gravis, the game just crashes. To start the game I had to make sure the contoller was not plugged in so I could at least play using the keyboard. This was very hard though. I couldn't easily do a lot of the needed combos. So my search began for a new controller. The battle was between two. I was looking at the Logitech and the Xbox 360 controller. I went with the Xbox 360 controller because I'd seen that there were drivers for it in Linux. I wasn't able to find anything for the Logitech. I don't have any current games in Linu...