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At first glance, you may think the keyboard looks unreal. It is very slim, and well, just looks kind of strange in person. However, the keyboard is actually quite comfortable once you get used to it. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting much for the price I paid for the keyboard. It has gone beyond my expectations. Things actually do feel quite sturdy and the gripping pads on the keyboard really make it quite easy to type on. I have yet to try gaming with it, however because I just now fixed my PC with my new motherboard

One thing I noticed right off the bat, I can barely hear myself type. This thing is whisper quiet. Have someone that gets annoyed living with you and your typing? Well this board might be for you.

The one thing I do not like about this keyboard is the one “shift” button seems to be in an awkward place and is small. However, this might teach me to use the correct shift button when I type which is good, because I have always had trouble with that

I would reccommend you check this keyboard out if you’re on a low budget looking for a fairly high quality keyboard. I have broken my fair share of highly cheap keyboards so I don’t buy them anymore. Usually I will spend about $60 or so on a keyboard, but I didn’t have the money for it this time. Anyway definitely check it out if you’re in need of a keyboard

Well, I was getting tired of things loading very slow on my 256MB Gateway M210S with Windows XP. (If you don’t know, I’m using this laptop because my Bios went corrupt on my main PC.) What did I do about it? I installed a light weight distribution called CrunchBang. It’s based off of Ubuntu. Installing it wasn’t the hard part.

All my issues getting CrunchBang up and running correctly.. Maybe this will  help someone?

I ran into some issues with my Ethernet controller and my sound card! Those two things did not work at all out of the box. I searched around for my prism wireless card and was able to get online. I found what the model number the problematic hardware was via lspci. I found it was the BCM4401. Then I tried to enable the module via modprobe b44. It gave me errors. I searched around for the answer to this on the Ubuntu forums, and found it was related to my Kernel version, or possibly an installed package. Anyway, I removed that certain package, because I didn’t need it for my Wifi which doesn’t need any special drivers.

Eventually what I did was edit the sources.list file in /etc/apt and removed all the commented out lines did sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade. Restarted, wow ethernet works.

Next issue: SOUND! ICH4 – Intel 82801DB-ICH4 did not work at all! Went through the guides to get audio working, checked alsamixer to see if anything was muted or something weird. Apparently it’s related to external amplifier and all the switches. You can enable external amplifier in Alsa, and then go into your sound controller and uncheck all the switches. It works.

So, now everything works. Yay. Now I have a laptop that is 15X faster booting up and running applications. Worth the trouble? I think so. Maybe others wouldn’t. It took some time to get all the bugs fixed. I have gotten too used to Linux working out of the box, but with older laptop components, it doesn’t seem like that’s the way it goes. I know some wifi cards aren’t even supported, so you should definitely pick up a prism based wifi card if you’re using Linux on a laptop.

CrunchBang Review

CrunchBang is a modified Ubuntu distribution with a light weight open box GUI. Perfect for lower resource computers. I could barely play a youtube video in Windows XP, on CrunchBang, it’s no problem. Why use CrunchBang instead of some of the other light weight distros? Some of those light weight distros are a real pain to configure, probably A LOT worse than what I had to deal with.

CruchBang is a nice mix of usability while still being light weight. All you have to do is right click on the desktop to get a list of all the applications installed, and there’s many that come already installed. Almost anything you would want is already there. Because it’s Debian/Ubuntu based, you can also just use apt-get or aptitude to install various things without issues. It can’t get much easier

Also, CrunchBang is open-box meaning you can customize the GUI the way you want it. Personally, I like the default config, it looks fine.

So, have a low resource computer you want to get a little more out of? Try out CrunchBang Linux. If your computer is really low resource however, you may need to look into something like Slackware Linux with a very light weight GUI.

Wow, I thought my memory was going to be the first to fail, after all the horror stories I’ve heard about Ballistix. Apparently not.

All of a sudden, while I’m browsing the net with FireFox, my computer reboots. Then it says it’s trying to copy the bios from the hard drive or something. Then nothing. Nada. Won’t boot. I cleared the CMOS, I removed all unnecessary components, seated each ram stick separately. It’s dead. So I guess I”m in the market for a new motherboard

Stuff has been dying on me lately like my flash drive shows 0mb for some reason so it’s dead as well. Also all the stuff off my desktop had disappeared not long ago. Did I have a virus? I don’t know, I haven’t heard of any virus being able to destroy the bios completely in a long time. I’m really getting tired of it. Guess I”ll deal with this soon, because I can’t be without my main PC. The laptop is alright, but I really can’t do drops on it or a lot of other things

Before I totally give up on it though I’m going to *try* something I read online about putting the bios on a flash drive and boot it. If it doesn’t work, then I’m just going to buy a new one. Not a real big deal more along the lines of annoying, and I could have spent the money on something else.

Apparently I’m not the only one this has happened to, so it’s not really unheard of. This board must just get unstable for some odd reason. Going to pick up some new ram while I’m at it, I just don’t trust Crucial Ballistix.

The best explanation I can come up with is that I had my FSB running kind of high to make my memory run at 1000MHz and this caused an instability that didn’t rear its head till now, even though I ran prime95 for 24hrs a long time ago.

UPDATE

I’ve purchasesd the following components from NewEgg, the only thing that’s related to the failure is the $60 mobo, however.

MSI P45 Neo3-FR – $60 open box – Bad reviews on Newegg, good reviews elsewhere, go figure. Most seem to be related to Bios 1.3 or they don’t know what they’re doing.   So long as it doesn’t break I don’t care

LG 22X DVD±R DVD Burner  – Does dual layer as well. Didn’t really research this one, don’t really care so long as it works.

Patriot Extreme Performance 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 – Good ram from reviews.

SAMSUNG SpinPoint T Series HD501LJ – Good review on Anandtech.

That’s about it.. Really just some other upgrades I wanted. I also bought an OCZ Keyboard because I want something better to type with, but I’m still keeping my current one for FPS games.

I suppose you could say I’m pretty rough on computer hardware, which is why I try to buy “enthusiast” grade equipment but that fails as well.

Running Vista? It seems you shouldn’t be. The windows 7 beta seems to be beating out Vista in all performance tests. Windows 7 also uses far less memory and performance is much better. For those of you who hate Vista, maybe you should give Windows 7 beta a try.

However, it has been reported that Windows 7 looks and feels strikingly like Mac OSX. Very similar to Vista, but not completely. Still, if you’re running Vista right now, you may want to give Windows 7 a go, because I’m sure you’re annoyed with it’s performance and memory usage. If not, well you should be

For me, I’m still sticking with XP and Ubuntu primarily, but I may give Windows 7 a go at some point in the near future. If I do, expect a full write up on my experience. I absolutely hated windows Vista, I thought it was a piece of garbage that should have never been released. I actually may feel exactly the same way about Windows 7 because I’m more of a minimalist when it comes to GUI garbage.

I had Compiz running on Ubuntu and it gave me a bunch of problems and performance errors. Eventually I asked myself is this worth it? I came to the conclusion it wasn’t, and turned it off. If I could turn Windows 7 into XP with the default theme and windows 98 look I would be happy, because to be honest the only thing I like  about Vista/7 is the fact it has DX10.

Why do these companies keep focusing on GUI so much. I could care less about GUI I care more about functionality. Does it run better than XP, is it more secure, reliable? The answer to those questions for Vista is no. Trojans for XP still worked on Vista? Are you kidding me? I’m going to guess the same is true for Windows 7. No real improvements, just looks pretty and is less of a resource pig.

Maybe more people will switch this time around. I might, who knows. Maybe I’ll wait until all new games no longer work on Windows XP Again, those of you running Vista, it might be a good idea to check out Windows 7 if you want to free up some resources.